


The Third Space

by fabella



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Adventure, Bad Science, F/M, Journey, M/M, Pining, Quest, Romance, Search and Rescue, i mean i wrote it so of course there is pining, really really bad science, tilting at windmills of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-28 22:50:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13913823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabella/pseuds/fabella
Summary: Cisco Ramon goes missing (a story about Harry Wells).





	The Third Space

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks go out to reeby10 here on AO3 (voldiebuns @tumblr) for combing through this fifty page disaster and all the rusty-ass grammar I so kindly left behind. I appreciate all the time and effort, truly.

They find Cisco in the basement.

Barry gets there first, for obvious reasons. He’s out of the truck and in the house ahead of Harry in a streak of light and sound. The Killer Frost bobblehead on the dash rattles in his wake. Harry doesn’t fall far behind. He can’t. He gives chase through Barry’s debris, blinded by the glare of late morning sun. He carries Caitlin in the crackle of static in his ear.

Harry slams up the steps of the old farmhouse and shoulders his way through the door still swinging on its hinges. Inside, dust motes float like tiny diamonds and the curtains sag from the rods, heavy with dirt and cigarette smoke. Roosters preen at him from peeling yellow wallpaper. Harry circles the lower level, pushes through a room of stacked wooden rocking chairs, and finds himself in the kitchen, staring at the open basement door.

It’s too dark to see beyond a few cement steps.

“Barry?” Harry calls out at the top of the stairs.

“Don’t come down,” Barry says. “Stay up there, Harry.”

Harry pulls the gun from his waistband and descends, feeling along the bumpy wall for a light switch. His eyes itch from three sleepless nights, and the dust he kicks up makes them burn. Harry finds the switch at the bottom. He flips it and a gloomy lightbulb snaps on reluctantly overhead.

“Harry?” Snow crackles at him. “Did we find him? Were we right?”

Harry’s fingers tremble on the switch.

Cisco floats four feet off the dirt floor, suspended weightlessly in tendrils of watery blue light. His head is tilted back, long dark hair flowing behind him like wet ink. His chin is lifted toward the ceiling and there’s something metallic and wet leaking from his nostrils into his open mouth. His eyes are open, unseeing and charged like atoms, fixed on some distant point. Harry hears a choked cry and it pulls him back into his own body, because it was him. He stumbles off the last step and his ankle rolls over his boot. His gun hangs heavy in his left hand. He drops it.

“Don’t touch him,” Barry grates, on his knees in the dirt, red hood bunched around his neck. The flashlight is off in his hands, hanging forgotten between his fingers, and the freckles stand out on his pale cheeks. “I think you should go upstairs.”

The silver puddle at Cisco’s feet shivers at Barry’s voice, retreating closer to the wall.

Harry lurches past him and Barry grabs him by the jacket. Harry snaps left and seizes Barry, boiling, lifting the kid up by his hood, but Barry slips out of his grip and Harry is caught up, spun faster than he can process. He thuds face first against the wall and Barry pins him there by the nape of his neck.

“Chill out.” Barry flexes his hand. “Or go back to the truck.”

Harry squirms, getting the dirty cement wet with his spit, and Barry presses harder. Lights flash behind Harry’s eyelids.

“Ok,” Harry grates out at last. “I’m chill. Get him down.”

“That’s the plan.” Barry backs off, letting Harry off his tiptoes, and Harry snaps his jacket back into place, turning to glare at Barry while swiping the mud off his face. “But we don’t know how far in the hole he is, if he’s managed to find Cynthia, if---” but Harry stops listening. Barry’s voice fuzzes into white noise. Harry tracks to the left of Barry’s bloodless, strained face and it melts away. Cisco floats behind him, body caught like a puppet, a bookmark holding the hole in the universe open.

It’s Ohio, Cisco. Nothing heroic is supposed to happen in Ohio.

“He’s dying,” Harry says. “The Council of Wells was right. His body won’t hold up much longer.”

Barry turns away in frustration.

“Did you hear a word I just said?” Barry scrubs his face with gloved hands and says, pacing each word, “Ok, look. We just need to---”

He crumples to the ground. Harry watches Barry pretzel into himself on the floor, eyes rolling wildly, body flopping. Harry takes his finger off the trigger in his pocket when Barry loses consciousness.

“Sorry, Allen. It’s a recipe from Wells 2.0. He suggested you might get in the way.”

Harry steps over him to where Cisco hangs, frozen, a trillion miles away.

Harry stares at him for a moment, at his lovely, empty face.

“Forgive me,” he says, and then reaches out with both hands and takes Cisco back.

*

Rewind three weeks and Cisco is conveniently, gloriously single. Cisco copes with that fact loudly. There’s this t-shirt he has that proclaims his relationship status as  _dismantling heteronormativity brick by brick and don’t have time for your nonsense,_ which Harry chooses to consider a hopeful sign. It’s during this golden age that Harry gets Cisco on his back at last, an angle he’s been grudgingly pursuing for nearly two years.

It is, objectively, a high point in Harry’s life.

Cisco sticks out like a shiny bronze coin at another masturbatory charity ball where Iris expects a meta to make an appearance. He’s taken his role as Harry’s arm candy to heart and dressed up in that slick tuxedo of his, the one with the bedazzled suspenders that Harry barely resists snapping and his goddamn hair is up. Harry doesn’t take a single drink of champagne, but Cisco-shaped bubbles pop in his head the entire night. There are suspicious smudges of eyeliner creasing Cisco's eyes and Harry is a weak man. It’s a relief when the meta tries to kidnap the ambassador.

Harry finds himself trailing Cisco home under the pretense of crashing on Cisco’s couch. Cisco doesn’t question it, goofy tired in a way that is endearingly familiar. Cisco throws his jacket over his shoulder when they get on the elevator and lets Harry deal with pressing the button for the right floor while Cisco holds the wall up. Harry keeps returning to the shape of Cisco’s hips under the pleated, charcoal fabric. Cisco yawns hugely and reaches up to block it with his forearm, but ends up slipping sideways in the process. Harry catches him and thumps him against the mirrored panel.

Cisco lifts his face and chuckles. Chipmunk grin. Eyes nearly all the way shut. He hangs loosely in Harry’s arms like he’s been hitting the punch bowl all night.

“You didn’t drink, right?” Harry asks.

Cisco’s eyebrows twitch together. “How stupid do you think I am?”

The elevator doors open onto Cisco’s floor, but Harry thumps him against the wall without thinking about it. Cisco goes still and watchful, skin around his mouth softening as his lips part. It reveals the gap in his lower teeth. Enchanted, Harry bends and kisses the faint groove in his cheek. Cisco’s stubble prickles Harry’s lips, but the skin beneath is hot.

Cisco’s palms squeak against the panel. Harry drags his lips to the damp corner of Cisco’s mouth, tasting a hint of cinnamon gum. The doors trundle closed, and Cisco’s bottom lip drops as he pushes his chin forward, filling Harry’s mouth with his tongue. Harry gropes up the elevator wall and it’s not at all what he wants to do.

“Harry,” Cisco rasps and Harry pulls back just enough to see the heat glazing Cisco’s dark eyes. He waits, their bellies inches apart, noses grazing indecisively as the elevator descends once more. When it hits the bottom and no one gets on, Cisco knots his fingers around Harry’s tie and reels him in. The ground vanishes beneath Harry’s feet. He reaches out blindly and stabs several buttons before the doors come together again. Cisco spins them and climbs the bars of Harry’s hips. They make the return trip to Cisco’s apartment. The doors open on nearly every floor. Cisco chews his neck raw, destroys the artful twist of his hair, and Harry makes a concentrated effort not to fuck Cisco right there.

*

The ground rears up and hits Harry in the face. Harry rolls, wheezing unproductively. His brain spins in his skull and he attempts to cough his lungs up, but they snag behind his bones, setting off a ringing in his ears. Gasping for air, he holds his ribs and blinks until the world stops wobbling, only to blink again and sit up. With watering eyes, Harry stares straight ahead, beyond the sharp cliff drop he narrowly avoided.

Under a shining, silver-feathered sky, a pyramid eats up the horizon. Crumbled and devastated, bits of it floating separate from the rest like a disordered puzzle, but---Harry squints. Yes, that’s a pyramid.

Harry has no idea what that means.

He makes the turbulent trip to his feet, picking his glasses up on the way. His joints scrape and crack and when he’s upright, his blood plummets from his head to his toes. He drifts sideways. It’s close, but he doesn’t pass out. He hops on one foot to catch his balance, unearthing pebbles and spitting them over off the edge. They tumble away into silence.

Beyond the pyramid, there are other shapes, twisted figures tangled among a blue-gray haze. What looks like the fire-carrying hand of the Statue of Liberty reaches from out of a tangle of rusted bridges. The sky glimmers with a directionless half-light, a shivering color that is familiar.

 “Cisco,” Harry says, on instinct. He looks at his scraped palms. He’s almost surprised to find them empty when he clearly remembers clutching Cisco, the chilled slick feel of his leather suit, Cisco’s unseeing eyes, face lifted in the fixed way of romantic era soldiers; Harry’s heartbeat tripping like a drum behind his sternum. And then, the strong tug between his eyes, it hurts, no, fucking stop, it hurts, an impression of structures beyond his comprehension---

He’s in the third space. Somewhere between here and there. _Theoretically._

 “I was half-right,” he says. He stomps on the all too solid ground and waves his hands around in the open air above his head. There’s no portal. No break in space. It’s as if Harry fell out of the sky. No clear exit. And no Cisco. “Dammit, Ramon. I’m going to wring your pretty little neck.”

A rush of wind kicks up behind Harry, pressing hard enough on his back to make him stumble. Harry turns and behind him stands a gnarled tree as tall as a skyscraper. What looks like a child’s cotton-stuffed doll swings by one stuffed hand from a high branch. It sends a shiver up Harry’s spin. Cisco would have been truly sketched out by it. He wouldn’t have crossed the barbed wire fence into the orchard beyond. Harry follows the scent and drags his battered body in search of a way off the cliff that’s not straight down.

It takes a while to stiff-knee it to level ground. Harry pats himself down and takes inventory of what items crossed the breach with him. He finds a round of ammo, but the gun is where he dropped it, keeping Barry’s unconscious body company. Harry almost tosses it in disgust before he thinks better of it. He has his watch, the knife his wife bought him before she ran off with that traveling librarian, several toothpicks, a pack of mints, and a sharpie. Harry pops a mint in his mouth and clacks it around behind his teeth as he pushes through tall, damp grass.

When he reaches the bottom of the cliff, he hesitates, because what next?

His plan hadn’t included a search and rescue. If Cisco was the link, Harry should have passed right through to the Cisco-link in the third space. So much for the great minds sitting on the Council of Wells.

Harry looks behind him, to the left, then the right. Strange shapes float out of the fog in every direction. If there are any rules or logic to this nightmare, he’s standing where Cisco has stood before. What is Cisco if not curious? Harry turns his gaze toward the dissolving pyramid. He starts walking, certain he is following Cisco’s footsteps even if there are no visible tracks to suggest it.

The pyramid ends up being further away than it appears. Harry checks his watch to get an idea of how long it takes to cross the expanse. He passes what looks like a four-way intersection with a blinking yellow traffic light suspended from by an invisible wire and scoots around it instead of walking directly underneath. He checks his watch again.

As he walks, he tallies Cisco’s recent wrongs so that when he finds Cisco, he can give him the bullet points. He’s faithless. Misleading. Reckless.

Heartbreaking.

Something cries out deep within a tangle of floating street signs, and Harry’s heart catches and starts pounding. He’s not interested in meeting the local wildlife. He tucks his chin against chest and walks faster, cupping the rubber handle of the knife.

“I’ll be seriously pissed if I get eaten,” he grumbles.

Harry ignores the mournful howl that follows him and pushes on. Cisco went off the grid approximately three days ago when he offered to do the coffee run and never came back. The first warning sign had been Cisco’s offer to pay. The second was that he’d thanked Harry for his help tracking Cynthia and when he left, he squeezed Harry’s shoulder and made more direct eye contact than he had since Cynthia first went off the rails. It was enough to paralyze Harry in his seat for the next ten minutes, which had been just enough time for Cisco to disable the GPS on his phone and the trackers Harry had “covertly placed for everyone’s best interest, Dr. Snow, it’s not stalking if it saves his life,” in Cisco’s glasses, his jacket, his gloves, his watch, and his left shoe.

“I’m an idiot,” Harry says. “No, Ramon is the idiot. I’m just a bystander.”

It was time for the team to revisit Harry’s suggestion of microchip implants.

As Harry approaches the pyramid, the rocky terrain smooths into sand that brings to mind the dry wastelands Wells 2.0 spills the blood of his enemies on. It gives way under his boots and slows his pace. Harry pauses to scoop a handful of it and the sand drifts upward from of his hand, fading away into electric blue static. Harry dusts his hands off and eyes the stones floating separate from the pyramid, caught by a magnetic force. Cisco absentmindedly stirs spare change above his palm like that when he’s in the mood to show off.

It takes Harry over two hours to reach the cool shadow of the pyramid. He passes several more bizarre growths in the fog: a handful of dice in constant motion, half of a crashed plane, and also the rib cage and spine of a giant, deceased mammal, which Harry gives a wide berth. Cisco hadn’t mentioned giant beasts in any of his theories about the third space. Hopefully he had thought to vibe a harpoon with him.

Up close, the stones of the pyramid are deep red and cracked. Harry slows as he approaches the base. A single stone is taller than he is and three times that in width. Entire rows appear and vanish, flickering like a hologram between their own world and this one. Harry can feel the energy pull at him, heavy and as real as gravity. Is this the power that drew Cynthia?

 

 

 

> _“When breachers still had the guts to come here, they told stories about the power of the third space.” Wells 2.0 preferred to keep his hands busy when he was monologuing, and since he was several earths away, Harry didn’t mind that ‘busy’ meant juggling hunting knives and grenades. “Third space is a stupid name for a place that powerful, though. Our breachers called it the blood passage. That’s a respectable name for a place that births travelers.” H. Lothario Wells lounged on the stairs in the background, watching with drugged bliss as the knives flew higher and faster. “Your Cynthia---”_
> 
> _“Not my Cynthia,” Harry cut in. “Not even this earth’s Cynthia. She’s ‘not our problem’ Cynthia, as far as I’m concerned.”_
> 
> _“Clearly an evolution of your self-preservation instincts,” 2.0 remarked, catching and releasing a grenade with faint disinterest. “She has good instincts too. The blood passage makes worlds and destroys them. She’ll find a way to use it to get her old man back. I gouged out my old man’s eyeballs and roasted them in garlic and thyme, but I admire her spirit.”_
> 
> _“I admire her shape,” Lothario said, rolling onto his back._
> 
> _“She’s in fighting form,” 2.0 agreed. “Little Cisco is too soft to kill her. He’ll lose.”_
> 
> _Wolfgang Wells huffed from behind his own holographic marker board. “The point isn’t to kill her, you beast. He’s going to save her.”_
> 
> _“Disgusting.” 2.0 spat a black wad somewhere on his own earth. “Sentiment.”_
> 
> _Harry stared hard at the weather map while the holograms bickered in the background. There would be a pattern. Cisco had disabled the trackers and the satellite hadn’t picked up his unique energy pattern in more than twelve hours, but Cisco wasn’t nowhere._
> 
> _“He’s trying to save her and you’re trying to save him. I love a good romance.” Lothario wandered close with his robe precariously placed. Reception weakened in this part of the room, and he flickered when Harry turned to glare at him, tip of his cigar winking orange as he took a thoughtful drag. “What are you going to do when you catch him, Harry?”_

In present time, Harry reaches out cautiously, fingertips first, then with his whole palm. The stone is cold and rough. Solid. Limestone. The energy here is thick enough for Harry to sense it, but does it originate from here? Harry looks up and up, craning his neck to see the peak. Cisco would have done the same. He would have been winded by the impressive structure, wonderous even as he cracked wise about Raiders of the Lost Ark. Did he pause to take a selfie? No. No, he wouldn’t have.

Harry’s hand is red when he lifts it away. He rubs the dust off on his pants and considers the angle of the stones. There’s no easy path up. Would Cisco have tried to make the climb when his fear of heights sometimes gave him a difficult time on a small step ladder? Or would he have reconsidered as stones vanished for several long seconds before reappearing?

As Harry searches for a Cisco-friendly path, a chunk of limestone shimmies loose and plummets toward his face and Harry drops three years of his life in the space of a heartbeat. Before he can dive for cover, the stone shakes to a stop, then lifts sharply in the direction of the silver sky and shatters against an invisible barrier with a booming quake. A rainbow of sparks showers the sky. Harry flinches and covers his head. The sky doesn’t suddenly drop on him. The sparks dissolve away like dying fireflies and Harry slowly peeks his head out. Ashes drift gently from above.

There was no way that Cisco had scaled the pyramid, even in consideration of his unremitting curiosity---not unless he was more stupid than he’d let on. This wasn’t the source of his powers. It was just another relic from another world.

Cynthia, whittled down by grief, was still as smart and as ambitious as any version of her could claim to be. She wouldn’t be attracted by a pretty pyramid still half present in its own universe unless it housed the power she was seeking. If it couldn’t be her reset button, she wouldn’t be there. And Cisco wouldn’t have gone anywhere Cynthia wouldn’t. Harry slaps the stone and bits of it crumble away to dust.

 

 

 

> _“If you find her first,” Wells 2.0 asked, slicing meat chunks with his hunting knife. “You think you can take her?”_
> 
> _“I’m not going to hurt her,” Harry said, scowling. “I’m not the bad guy here.”_
> 
> _Wells 2.0 chewed with his mouth open. “Even if your little bedwarmer never finds out?”_

Harry tracks the edge of the pyramid, measuring the length of it in footsteps. He pushes through knee-high sand drifts that refill seconds after he passes. As he nears the corner of the structure, a sporadic flash in the distance catches his attention. Some of the fog has lifted from the knot of aging iron bridges miles away, revealing a trail underneath. Harry squints. The light swells and jumps away again. The fog drifts back in, concealing the path, but Harry feels that tingle between his eyebrows and it’s as good as any plan he has right now. He’s going to chase it.

Harry shifts through the sands and the fog quickly overtakes him. It makes him want to hold his breath. He reaches into the fog with flat palms and takes each blind step carefully.

Jesse had a reoccurring nightmare for the first year after her mother left. She became lost in a forest while searching for the purple dress her mother liked her to wear on Sundays, and she slowly grew aware of an intense heat. Smoke rolled in from all sides, billowing in between the trees. Jesse wandered mindlessly through the hot white space, crying for her mother. Harry startled awake many nights to those sobs: marrow-deep, haunting, like she’d been left to die.

To help Jesse, he taught her to find her own comfort in the nightmares. At first, she would just imagine the feel of Harry’s hand in her own, then she learned to visualize it, fingertip to entire arm, until she could dream up the whole of him leading her away from the smoke. She stopped wetting her bed, forgot how to cry, and before long, she stopped holding his hand. Harry could have borne it longer. He still seeks love that is just out of reach.

The fog thickens. Harry can almost see the curve of Cisco’s sturdy shoulders in the distance. It turns out to be the iron lashing of a bridge folded on itself. Harry ducks through the gap and nearly brains himself on a low-hanging beam. He catches his glasses before they topple off and hangs onto the iron bar as he edges around it.

“Ramon?” Harry shouts, hopefully. Foolishly. “Cisco?”

Complete silence answers him. It presses heavily on his ears. He can’t see his own outstretched hand, but the faint green light of his wrist watch illuminates the compass function just enough to beckon him forward.

 

 

 

> _“Just keep it, Harry,” Cisco said. “It’s a functional gift. Sturdy. Boring. Just like you. Why don’t you like it?”_
> 
> _Harry tried to push the package back at him. “It’s birthdays I don’t like, Ramon.”_
> 
> _“I happen to love birthdays. Almost as much as baby seals and you know how I feel about baby seals. Wear the damn watch.”_

In time, Harry finds his way out of the fog. He emerges before a twisted gothic gate three times his height. A gargoyle growls down at him in frozen predation. Harry makes a face at it. Beyond the gate, there is a row of cherry blossom trees shedding its flowers. And further on, the gutted rubble of a town. Harry waits. The square of light catches his eye again, then dies out. Every thirty seconds or so. Is it a trap? Likely.

Harry shoves on the gate, but it doesn’t budge, so he gives it a halfhearted kick and starts climbing. The gargoyle doesn’t look any prettier up close than it did from the ground. The exhaustion hits him for the first time when his jacket gets caught on a sharp edge and he barely has the energy to hang from one arm so the other can unhook the fabric. Once freed, he shimmies himself up and over and somehow falls half the distance to the ground. He lands on his side, one boot kicked up.

“Gonna wring his neck,” Harry says to the dirt. He rotates his shoulder gingerly and climbs back to his feet, dusting flower petals off his sleeves.

The light flickers and jumps away. He follows it into town.

It leads him past silent houses and empty bus stop benches covered in piles of cherry blossom petals. He follows it to a single-pump gas station that still sells premium for five cents a gallon, if the road sign Harry flicks as he passes is to be believed. The truly dazzling feature is the station’s lack of boarded windows. A stack of newspapers sits zip-tied on the entrance stairs, pages stirred by the occasional breeze. It’s the closest to civilization Harry has felt since falling down this rabbit hole.

Harry’s skin prickles with the faint excitement that precedes being struck by lightning.

The only visible sign of the station’s disarray is the fact that one of the store sign’s chains is broken and dangling toward the stairs. Harry gives it a poke as he climbs onto the porch, and it swings slightly before settling back into place. Harry turns his head, scanning the old-fashioned advertisements, and sees it from the corner of his eyes: a broken shard of mirror, in roughly the shape of a square, propped against the window pane. His body blocks the source of its light. When Harry steps to the left, it winks in and out again, and Harry looks around, looks up. The sign. Harry stares at it blankly. It was the fucking sign swinging from the rafter, blocking the light and unveiling it---every thirty seconds or so, like clockwork.

Not a signal. An accident of gravity and placement.

Harry’s shoulder twinges. He shuts his eyes and swallows the glass.

It’s time to consider that he really has no idea what he’s doing. He’s an idiot for coming here. He doesn’t know where he is, what the rules are, and it’s possible that he’s just ass over teakettle crazy and this is all just an elaborate hallucination. Cisco is somewhere else entirely. Maybe that’s---maybe that’s good. He could be safe.

Harry opens his eyes to his reflection in the window, sees the deep creases in his face, dirt and blood around his nostrils. He smudges the blood across his cheek and turns away from the light, and then he stumbles, one knee weakening like a trap door falling open.

There. On the bottom step. With impossibly long hair pulled to the side in a messy braid, grizzly facial hair, and an unfamiliar gun pointed directly between Harry’s eyes---

“Cisco,” Harry breathes.

*

When they finally manage to untangle enough to make it into Cisco’s apartment, they fuck obsessively for hours, until Harry’s cock hurts too much to be touched. They don’t make it out of their clothes right away and that’s Harry’s fault. In his defense, he really likes those suspenders, especially with that crisp white shirt open beneath them. The most Harry manages is to get Cisco’s tuxedo pants and boxers pulled off one leg and pushed to the side, and that’s purely logistics.

Cisco has a nice firm chest and a sweetly soft stomach, and he hisses when Harry fucks into him as quickly as he can manage without inflicting lasting harm. It’s all too quick, too urgent, with inadequate preparation, but Cisco arches for it, gets his thigh around Harry’s hip and takes it so selflessly. Harry’s perfect little martyr. It’s possible it isn’t very good for Cisco the first time, but Harry is mindless at the opportunity, every bit as selfish as two earths would suggest. Harry climaxes quickly, pushed over by Cisco’s gritted teeth and tangled hair and the tip of his dusky red cock peeking out over the bunched fabric of his tuxedo pants.

Harry finishes stripping Cisco and makes it up to him, apologizing in his own suffocating way. He rolls Cisco this way and that, maps the textures of his skin and learns how to take Cisco apart. Cisco leads Harry’s mouth to the silky crease where his thigh becomes his ass and Harry feasts there, biting and sucking until Cisco writhes and bucks him off, then Harry fucks Cisco’s ass with his tongue and fingers while Cisco holds his legs open and jolts against the pillows he’s propped against.

Cisco’s thighs tighten when he gets close. Harry watches. Cisco starts holding his breath for long moments, cheeks going red, and Harry tucks all this information away. It’s not satisfying enough to simply experience it; he needs to know the parts of it, where Cisco’s pleasure fits together, how to break it and use it, and Cisco doesn’t realize how wide the jaw of Harry’s hunger can stretch, because if he did know, he wouldn’t then guide Harry by the chin up to his cock so he can spill across Harry’s parted lips.

That’s the first time.

“I’m not done,” Harry growls against Cisco’s shuddering stomach. “Can you handle more?”

Cisco reaches out to pat the side of Harry’s head clumsily and Harry takes Cisco’s thumb into his mouth. He bites down.

Finally, in the watery blue light of morning, Harry takes care of himself while Cisco dozes against the least sweat-soaked pillow they can scavenge out of the wreckage of linen. He nuzzles Cisco’s throat and shoulder from behind while he gets himself off and Cisco mutters half-hearted encouragement at him until Harry buries his face in Cisco’s hair and comes again. Cisco stretches against him after and it’s done. It’s time to let Cisco sleep, even if the silence seems obscene in the aftermath.

“Your feet are cold,” Cisco grumbles under his breath, then sleeps.

Harry counts Cisco’s ribs like sheep. He dozes but wakes often, and Cisco is there each time, a hand-span away with hair spilled across his face, cheek squashed against the pillow and mouth gaping. In two or three hours, Cisco will wake for the day and look a little surprised to find Harry in his bed, but he’ll shake it off and kiss the side of Harry’s sour mouth, eyes wide open. There will be coffee and breakfast and a hand on Harry’s thigh. He’ll do the worst thing he could do to the old man in love with him. He’ll be kind.

*

Cisco lowers the gun two inches and Harry feels his heart skip. The wind tugs on the loose hairs not caught up in Cisco’s braid. He’s dressed in shreds of his own vibe suit, reinforced by metal plates and curled, rusted nails. Duct tape buffers his thighs. Plastic bags peek from his shoes.

“Harry,” he says, blankly, like he doesn’t believe it.

Harry can’t move. Cisco doesn’t. For several moments they square off, and Harry feels the tingle between his eyebrows flare like an exclamation point: Here! Found! Happy! Yes, yes, thank you, forebrain.

“You look like shit,” Harry says.

Cisco twitches. Still holding the gun up and a little to the left of Harry’s chest, he reaches into his pocket and pulls a rock out. He breaks eye contact with Harry to look at the rock thoughtfully, so Harry does too. Is there something special about this rock? Is it a fossil or a relic it, does it---Harry blinks when the rock hits him in the chest, then bounces off him. Harry watches it land on the top step, then looks back up at Cisco.

“Holy shit,” Cisco says and suddenly he’s grinning, sweet and wide, just like he does before he’s about to sink your battleship, and it’s all motion from there. He slams up the steps in a flurry of flashing metal and plastic rustling and he throws himself at Harry. Harry catches him mid air and Cisco shout-laughs in his ear and his arms go tight around Harry’s neck, tight, tighter. Harry squeezes Cisco’s ribs so hard it hurts his own fingers, clutching him close, then grabs Cisco by the hair, knotting his fingertips, and he feels Cisco’s heart pounding wildly against him.

“You’re ok,” Harry finds himself whispering, lips mashed against Cisco’s ear. “It’s ok. You’re fine. I found you.”

And then Cisco starts crying, sobbing in his arms. He drops his weight to the porch. Harry follows him down and holds him.

*

“Months,” Harry repeats.

Cisco sniffles. Tears have left clean streaks on his otherwise muddy face. “Closer to a year.”

Harry shakes his head. “No,” he says and points to the date on his watch. “Three days.”

Cisco shrugs and reaches down to fiddle with the bags he has wrapped around his boots in place of the Velcro he’s so fond of. They’re sitting on the steps together, side by side, and Cisco keeps stealing looks at him, furtive, hungry glances that Harry would have done despicable things to have seen---three days ago. Now it’s out of place. This is not the Cisco Harry has situated neatly into a box with colorful graphic shirts, oil smells, and inviting smiles.

“Months,” Harry says again. “That’s. I don’t know what that is.”

“There’s food here,” Cisco offers. “You just have to kill it. We’re sitting in one of the better hunting grounds right now. It’s possible to live here.”

“Why didn’t you come home?”

Cisco looks away from him again. He finds a stick and pokes at the step.

“You haven’t found her,” Harry says. He cracks the knuckles of his right hand.

“It’s complicated. I can feel her,” Cisco says, and that punches Harry in the face. Cisco looks up, peering at something not right in front of them. “It’s stronger today. I think she’s circling back to the pyramid. You saw that, right?” Cisco laughs, a little manic. “Yeah, right, how could you miss it. It’s like---big.”

Enough.

“It’s time to go back,” Harry says.

Cisco rises to his feet, metal plates clanging, and tosses the stick to the side. “I’m kind of wiped but I can probably open a portal for you. I’m 65% sure it will take you to an Earth. I can’t promise which one.”

Harry jumps down the steps after him. “Wait just a damn minute.”

Cisco tosses his braid out of the way and keeps walking. In the middle of the abandoned street he throws his hands up in that familiar stance and his fingertips start to glow.

“Stop,” Harry says. “You’re dying.”

The glow fades from Cisco’s fingers. He looks at Harry over his shoulder.

“At home.” Harry waves over his shoulder vaguely. “Your body is giving out. Whatever it’s taking to keep you here and there at the same time, it’s killing you. Your kidneys will go first, then your heart. You might still be here in some form, but I don’t know what that will look like when your brain dies.”

Cisco’s shoulders droop a little. “How much time do you think?”

“Back there?” Harry shrugs. “Twelve hours, possibly. A day at the most. We didn’t exactly have time to do labs and find out precisely.”

Cisco bites his bottom lip.

“Time to go home, Ramon,” Harry says, voice raising because Cisco is already shaking his head.

“That’s a few months, maybe. That’s all I need. Bodies heal.”

“Almost a year, you said.” Harry reaches out and puts a hand on Cisco’s shoulder and it feels unnaturally pointy. “If she’s here at all, she clearly doesn’t want your help or you’d have found her by now. You feel, what? Guilty that you dumped her and then her dad died? If she wants to go dark-side to find the heart of her power, that’s not on you. Come home.”

Cisco pushes his hand away. “For the fifth time, the break up was a mutual, and can you stop harping on about that? And also, no. She’s not going dark-side. I can stop her.” Cisco’s eyes turn inward and become weighted. “She’s my friend. She needs me.”

Harry stares at him. “I’m your friend,” he says, but it sounds like something else.

Cisco twitches. Before Harry can chase that twitch, his stomach growls like it has something to prove. Harry covers it sheepishly. Breakfast was coffee and that was a long time ago. He’s not winning this argument right now anyway.

“You mentioned food,” Harry says.

Cisco rolls his eyes, bitchy to the end, but stomps past Harry, braid swinging in his wake. The glass door of the station slams shut after him and the sign gives up at last, slips from its final hook and crashes into the bushes by the stairs. Something shrieks and skitters away under the building, making Harry jump. Harry makes an educated decision to follow Cisco inside, which is how he learns that space snake tastes exactly nothing like chicken.

Cisco lets him rest for an hour, hardly speaking, then drags a duffel out from a cabinet.

“Where are we going?”

Cisco doesn’t look at him. He unzips the bag and fusses with the contents.

“Hey, Tiny Terminator!” Harry snaps his fingers in front of Cisco’s nose. “Hey! Hello?”

Cisco slaps Harry’s hand away. “You want in on this, Harry? I can vibe you out right now. We’ll get you home before the evening rush at Big Belly Burger starts.”

Cisco had cried when Harry was real.

“I’ve had time to reconsider,” Harry says.

“No, what you’ve had is indigestion, but I’m not against a sidekick on this venture.”

“Sidekick? Who’s a sidekick?”

Cisco ignores him. “Cynthia---I told you I felt her moving. She’s been cold for weeks now. It’s possible that someone-” Cisco pauses dramatically to point at himself- “discovered a certain object she wanted before she found it and, well.” Cisco pats the duffel. “Now she has to listen to me.”

The last time Harry saw Cynthia, she shattered Barry’s arm with a single touch. Listening didn’t seem high on her list of priorities.

“Ok,” Harry allows. “What’s this object?”

“Oh. You know. The source.”

Harry feels his eyes bulge. “You have the source in your duffel bag?”

Cisco shrugs. “Just a nugget of it, Harry. Don’t pop a vessel, man.”

Harry spins a murderous circle, a high-pitched noise rising within his throat. He turns on Cisco who has both eyebrows up inquisitively, like he’s not carrying around a galaxy-destroyer in a duffel bag held together by duct tape and good intentions. Harry lifts his hands to yank Cisco’s hair out, but curls them into fists instead and presses them against his own temple.

“You know you’re a drama queen, right?” Cisco asks primly.

Harry curdles a scream behind clenched teeth.

*

Harry follows Cisco away from the town and through the fog, but not without a few dirty looks at the bag carrying the catastrophic weapon that Cisco won’t let him look at because it apparently makes even Cisco’s eyes bleed. Always a good sign. Cisco trudges ahead of him, arm lifted to light the way through the fog with a gentle blue glow, gun in the opposite hand. Harry has a big stick.

“It’s sturdy,” Cisco said when Harry complained.

“I want a gun.”

“I have the gun.”

“Don’t be selfish, Cisco.”

Cisco smirked and said, “Don’t be greedy, Harry,” which shut Harry up for a number of reasons, the least of which being that it had been far too long since he’d properly satiated his greed. He doesn’t speak for a while. Sometime between one fog space and the next, he notices that the leather of Cisco’s pants is nearly worn through and completely ripped in a spot on his back thigh. A crease of dark skin and hair peeks through whenever Cisco moves just right. Harry swings his stick a little and considers the tear and the noise Cisco makes if you kiss him two inches to the left of it. It keeps Harry’s mind off the blister he can feel developing on his heel.

Cisco eventually motions directions over his shoulder. and in moments they’re stumbling out of the fog, at the rocky crossroads where Harry had first seen Cisco’s mirror trick.

Cisco stops and Harry bumps into him. “Um.”

Harry gapes.

Cisco turns left, then right, then looks straight ahead. “Shit,” he says, stomping in place. “Shit, shit, motherfuck.”

“I can’t even begin to do the math on that,” Harry says, because where the pyramid had stood some six-odd hours ago, the sands have drifted as if a thousand years have passed. The tip of the pyramid is barely visible.

“There was a storm,” Cisco mutters, hands on hips. “They happen here sometimes.”

Harry moves parallel to Cisco and surveys the damage. The landscape is changed, rusted bridges taken over by sand dunes as far as he can see. “That’s a pretty big storm, Ramon.”

“There’s a pattern to them when they happen.” Cisco unscrews the lid on the canteen of water and offers it. Harry takes a cautious sip. “See the horizon on that side? There’s an entire city under that. When the storm hits next, it will uncover it completely. Same thing will happen with this pyramid. Give it a few days and it will be like the storm never happened. This might actually be a good thing.”

“Giant sandstorms? Clearly fortuitous.”

Cisco smiles at him. “Cynthia won’t risk getting caught in it. She’ll take the long way around.”

“Smart.” Harry nods. “Good survival instincts.”

“If we cut straight through, we can get ahead of her.”

Harry catches Cisco by the shoulder. “Cut through? To where?”

Cisco sighs through his nostrils, as if Harry is being dim. Harry knows that sigh because he’s usually the one doing it.

“The temple. If she does know I have the source, there’s no reason for her to stay. She’s gonna use the temple gate to hop dimensions and find another piece of it. And before you ask, traveling from one third space to another isn’t like breeching, it requires taking the right door, a receptor---why do I feel like I’m monologuing? Am I monologuing at you? I’m talking really fast, right?”

Harry nods slowly.

“Ok,” Cisco blows out a breath. “I might be a little crazy now. Anyway, the trail by the pyramid was the straightest, least dangerous route---”

“And now the most dangerous because of the giant storm,” Harry adds.

“Essentially, yeah. She’ll find a way there though. We just need to get there first.” Cisco puts the safety on his gun and straps it to his back. “You’ll be glad you have the stick, Harry. You should find a cover for your face.”

It feels like swimming in microscopic shards of glass. A stretch of sand they cross is deep enough that he sinks to his knees, which brings it roughly to Cisco’s hips. He gets ahead of Cisco to dig a path with his own body, and when he looks back, Cisco has his head down, the part in his hair flecked with grit. It would be nice just to go home---sit with Cisco by the light of a computer, mock each other in equations, steal handfuls of his popcorn and watch Cisco pretend to be unmoved by him.

Harry loses his stick in a particularly angry gust of sand and Cisco convinces him to leave it behind. More than once Harry reaches back to pull Cisco out of overwhelming waves and Cisco’s eyes over the fabric protecting his airways dares him to comment on it.

“High knees,” Harry chirps. “Lift those legs, pal.”

Cisco gives him a shove that nearly sends him rolling down the dune. Harry catches himself with Cisco’s jacket and they both end up tumbling, startling a high-pitched laugh out of Cisco. Harry grins behind his face mask. They climb. Up one steep slope and down the next.

“How many times have you made this trip?” Harry shouts over the wind.

“I don’t know,” Cisco yells back. “Seven or eight now. I’ve been trying to move randomly. If I can feel Cynthia, she feels me. The only hope I have of getting to her is by chance or because she wants me to.”

“If she wants to take what you have, you mean,” Harry says.

“She won’t hurt me,” Cisco says, muffled.

Harry doesn’t say anything. He tugs his foot free from a hidden root and nearly loses his boot.

“Come on, man, she’s not a bad guy.”

“I’m only looking at the evidence.”

“Evidence,” Cisco scoffs. He stops and pushes the rag down to his neck. “What’s your real problem here, Harry? If a friend of yours was in danger, even if she was a danger to herself, I’d be right by your side, helping her. Is it a trust thing? You don’t trust my judgment?”

“I trust your compassion.”

Cisco stares at him. “You should just go home, Harry.”

“Cisco.” Cisco turns away and Harry finds himself wading after him again. “Let your little girlfriend go dark-side if that’s what makes her happy. Just---come back with me, so we can---scan what’s left of your brain. If there’s anything left.”

“My little girlfriend?” Cisco scoffs. The weird metal parts he has everywhere shudder as he throws up his hands. “My little girlfriend?”

Harry stops mid-rant. He crosses his arms over his chest.

“Is that what you think I’m doing? This isn’t some big romantic gesture, Harry.”

“Isn’t it?” Harry cuts in, but Cisco talks over him, louder.

“A woman who is dear to me, who was---who was in love with me---has lost someone close to her and it has destroyed her in a very intimate way, and I know that feeling Harry. I owe it to her to try to find her and fuck you for making that something less than it is---I’m not, I’m not selfish like you---I have actual feeling---”

“Feelings, right, more feelings than thought. I can see how far it’s getting you. Thank heavens you have your feelings.”

“You’re slowing me down,” Cisco huffs, wading through a heavy drift. Harry darts out to grab him, but Cisco’s arm turns to light and Harry’s hand goes straight through. The move visibly weakens Cisco and he stumbles, shaking his arm as it reforms.

Harry pursues him grimly.

“Stop being a brat, Cisco.”

Cisco stomps forward. His feet sink deeper with each step.

“Five minutes. Give me five minutes, Ramon, you owe me that.”

Cisco spins on Harry, braid slashing out and Harry stumbles in place.

 “Owe you?” Cisco’s mouth is small and puckered. “You think I owe you? Why is that? Because you fucked me?” Harry flinches. Cisco sharpens, bright like the edge of a knife. He moves in, pokes Harry in the chest and Harry falls back a step. “Well, thank you for the favor, Harry. I didn’t realize it was going to indebt me for life. Next time I won’t want more than a blowjob and maybe I can just give you one of my kidneys for that, how about it?”

“Stop it,” Harry chokes. “You’re---twisting it.”

“That’s not what you said that night,” Cisco says meanly, and it’s between them, the yawning hunger Harry carries within him. “You couldn’t get enough of my ass, Harry. I’ve never been fucked like that. And I’m supposed to be thankful, right? Thankful that I couldn’t sit right for days when you could hardly even look at me? Thankful you used me?”

“You’re confused,” Harry says, palms up. “You’ve been here too long, you don’t remember what happened clearly.” He reaches for Cisco’s hand but Cisco wrenches away and there’s bitterness on his face that Harry’s never seen before. “Cisco, wait.”

“Get off me!”

“Stop it, Cisco---just, _ouch, shit_ , did you just _bite_ me?"

He gets a grip on Cisco’s shoulder, yanks him in. A charge electrifies the air when Cisco bucks free. Harry dives and Cisco dodges, clenched teeth white under his black beard. He’s not a gifted fighter, not like the trained military men Harry learned from, but he uses his whole bodyweight and it’s like trying to catch a falling thorn bush.

“Go home, Harry,” Cisco hisses. “Get lost. That’s what you do, go, just do it.”

They scrabble at each other artlessly.

The hairs on Harry’s arms stand up from the static Cisco puts off. His glasses keep slipping out of place. Cisco takes out his knee and Harry hooks an arm around his thigh, climbs the hooks and straps on his scavenged armor. Cisco untangles one of Harry’s hands, but Harry entangles the other just as quickly while Cisco cusses at him and tries to shake him off.

Harry drags him close enough to feel Cisco’s heart pound between both their ribcages and Cisco throws wide, brown eyes at him. He puffs hot air on Harry’s chin. Harry considers kissing him. It couldn’t make anything worse really. He leans down.

Cisco grins and stabs pointed fingers under Harry’s armpits and he’s free again, popping away magic-quick. His braid snaps out behind him as an afterthought. Harry recovers quickly and lashes out to grab the braid just as Cisco darts up a hill. Cisco jerks to a short stop, making a gutted noise, and Harry twists his fist relentlessly. Cisco stumbles backward as Harry forces him to turn.

 “That’s not what happened,” Harry says. He climbs the shallow ledge of sand and his weight makes Cisco sink toward him, brings Cisco right into his arms. Harry leans his cheek against Cisco’s bristly one. “Your version of events is convenient, but you’re forgetting that I was there. Considering your aptitude at revising history, I wonder if your relationship with Cynthia was as cordially mutual as you claim.” Cisco tries to twist his head away, but Harry follows and grinds their cheekbones together. “Did you break her heart, Cisco? She trusted you and you hurt her and you feel so bad about it you can barely live with yourself.”

“She’s my friend.”

“No,” Harry whispers, and kisses Cisco’s cheek. “She never was.”

Cisco’s throat works visibly. Harry holds him as sand spits around them, striking the naked patches of their skin. Harry rubs Cisco’s back as Cisco’s panting shakes them. Cisco’s hands hang loosely, unreceptive.

“Tell me why we’re here,” Harry says.

“She blames me.” Harry loosens his hold on Cisco’s braid enough that Cisco can lift his head. The skin around his eyes is creased and bright red. “She was distracted. It was just a kid, but he got the jump on her because she---missed me.”

“And Daddy died saving her. It’s a tragedy. It’s also not your fault.”

Cisco can barely meet his eyes. He keeps skating just to the side or down, staring at a spot on Harry’s cheek. Harry wants to put him in his pocket.

“It’s ok,” Harry says, and tucks Cisco’s head down against his chest. He feels Cisco’s arms drift up his sides until Cisco’s holding him loosely in return. “You’re not leaving until you make this right?” He feels Cisco nod. “So, I’m going to stop wasting our time arguing with you then. You tell me everything you know about this place. We get her, fight her or capture her or however it ends up playing out, and then we go home. Simple.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Cisco mutters.

“Well, it is,” Harry says. “I’m here now.”

Cisco hiccups a laugh against Harry’s sternum.

“I love you,” Harry says. Cisco jerks and makes a sound like someone kicked him in the nuts and Harry squeezes him. “Shut up. I just feel like saying it out loud. I don’t need to hear it back.” Harry unravels Cisco’s braid and pats Cisco’s back before letting his arms drop to his sides. “Let’s go bully your ex-girlfriend into therapy.”

Cisco hesitates, still hooked around Harry’s waist.

“Harry,” he says.

And suddenly, it’s night, a darker shade of blue haze. Cisco becomes very still. The sting of sand intensifies multiplicatively. Hot air hits them in cyclical bursts, flattening Harry’s hair to his head and the jacket to his body, then sucks it away again and almost pulls him with it. They turn slowly, as one, and Harry is almost unsurprised as a giant, forgotten metal beast rises from the sand not twenty yards away. It clears the pit and shakes sand off like a dog and opens its enormous red eyes.

“I’d say be quiet, but that won’t help,” Cisco offers.

One eye spirals in their direction; a spinning, intelligent ruby fixed on them. Harry feels his digestive system shut down as fight or flight kicks in. His mouth runs dry. The monster emits a high-pitched whirring noise as its visible metal gears suddenly start oscillating.

“Put your mask back on.”

“Already done.”

“Good,” Harry says. “That’s good.”

Cisco’s hand fumbles over the front of Harry’s shirt, then latches on.

“Run,” Harry says, and shoves. Cisco takes off.

The monster chases them through the dunes with the subtlety of a Mack Truck. They run for so long Harry’s side starts aching. Cisco stays just ahead of him, hopping over stray debris a second before Harry does. Cisco falls once, kicking up a wave of sand, and Harry plucks him upright by the weapon strap across his back and then Cisco says, “Oh! Wait!” and swings a hard right, throwing up a pool of reflective blue light. He yanks Harry along with him.

They tumble down an incline together, Harry in the lead and Cisco just behind, makeshift armor clanging the whole way. Harry’s glasses fly off his ears. He grunts when he hits the bottom of the hill, winded, and grunts again when Cisco lands against him. Cisco’s duffel follows, skips Cisco, and bounces off Harry’s face. Sand still spins around them, tousled by the current of the storm.

“Ouch,” Harry says.

Cisco whimpers. “Same.”

Harry stares up at the sky in a daze. Another object, a rock the size of an RV, gets sucked up into the atmosphere with a whistling shriek.

 “It still looks so pretty,” Cisco says of the following light show. “Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I sold illegal homemade fireworks as a side gig when I was twelve? They almost tried me as an adult.”

Harry drags himself achingly to a seated position, cracking his neck. He feels around for his glasses and when he puts them back on; the right lens is splintered. He turns and watches the pink sparks of destruction kaleidoscope over Cisco’s skin. Blood seeps from Cisco’s left nostril. Harry doesn’t care about Cynthia, doesn’t have the space for it, but Cisco does, and she’s how Cisco goes home.

“What now?” Harry asks.

Cisco’s eyes drift toward the electric shower above them.

“I want to blow up the temple,” Cisco says, and it’s weird how that blood resembles a villainous mustache as it trickles toward his temples.

*

Before everything, this is how the fallout really happens:

Harry waits for an opportunity.

He doesn’t push. He restrains himself. When Cisco becomes jumpy and especially rude, Harry tries to respect that and give him space when what he really wants to do is fuck the mouthiness out of him. Any position will do. Harry passes for normal in the face of Cisco’s overcaffeinated mood swings, but he often finds himself swinging by Cisco’s desk like it’s a fixed point in a predetermined set. He says something. Cisco snaps back at him with something perceptive and unkind and Caitlin often apologizes to Harry over Cisco’s head with those big, sad eyes of hers.

In truth, no apology is necessary. He likes how well Cisco knows him.

Cisco, for his part, holds himself slightly apart when Harry lets him, a watchfulness about him that’s not in itself unusual. He mentions neither their night together nor the tender morning after, when he helped Harry back into his clothes and lingered in the doorway to kiss him goodbye and ended up pulling Harry back inside for another go.

Harry pulls his sharp parts back inside. He doesn’t throw stuff across the room. He washes his own coffee cup. He says please and thank you at least twice. All in all, considering there is a known version of himself out there who has allegedly consumed Cisco whole, Harry is on his best behavior.

Cisco warms. Slowly. Slowly, but he warms. Harry watches even closer.

There will be a moment. An opening. He won’t miss it.

Only it never does. A meta kills Cynthia’s father and her grief sends her careening through space and time like a new Kill Bill sequel. Next, the ‘Days Since Our Last Thoughtless and Unnecessary Act of Sacrifice’ calendar in the breakroom is abruptly reset to zero via their own Francisco Ramon of all people. It’s disappointing enough that Harry questions his taste.

*

“You’re hurt,” Harry says.

Cisco grunts.

Cisco holds himself like he’s sore as he trudges, forearm splinting his ribs. His silence rates his pain. This third space is something like his kryptonite or at least that’s how he had described it before he went off the grid. The vibe may have gained them distance, but not without a price. Harry still can’t close his eyes without seeing Cisco’s suspended body in the basement, metal unspooling from his pores like liquid thread. He snakes Cisco’s duffel and tucks it safely over his own shoulder.

“Just for an hour,” Harry says when Cisco grabs for it and winces, swinging the duffel out of reach. “I won’t even read your diary. Pinky swear.”

“It’s all hearts around your name,” Cisco promises. “With little arrows.”

“If only,” Harry mutters and lets the wish be lost in the sand.

Cisco leads them in some true north direction that only he can sense. They make several stops to sip water and to empty the sand from their shoes and pockets. Cisco’s fingers tremble and water splatters over his mouth, darkening the sand in his beard to mud. Harry steadies the canteen and Cisco drinks. Harry knows the exact moment the skin on his heel splits. Cisco secures the gash with tape when Harry starts bleeding into his boot. Harry keeps his balance on Cisco’s shoulder and can’t look at what Cisco is doing.

“I’m pretty sure you’ve taken bullets with less complaining,” Cisco observes, shoulder working under Harry’s hand.

“It’s my foot,” Harry says. “I need it for walking.”

“Yeah, and the rest of you is expendable, I get you.”

After what feels like more of the same for hours, Cisco motions for Harry to hang back.

Harry crouches in the sand, catching his breath as Cisco scrambles up a dune and stretches to his full height at the top, lifting his hand to block the sand away from his eyes. The gun strapped to his shoulders stands out like a set of antlers. Harry sticks his thumb under his mask while he waits, chewing on his nail. Cisco turns at last and pumps both arms up in the air, victorious, and Harry’s muscles slowly unclench. Cisco skids down the slope too quickly and splashes sand up to Harry’s knees.

“We’re stopping?” Harry asks, voice muffled.

Cisco tugs his mask down, smile gleaming.

“We’re going shopping,” Cisco says, bizarrely.

It makes sense when it’s Harry’s turn to crest the dune. In the distance, the red bullseye of Target’s sign glows like a beacon to capitalist heaven. Where the electricity comes from, Harry doesn’t begin to speculate.

“I don’t like box stores,” Harry says. “The merchandise is always subpar.”

Cisco waves him off. “Yeah, well, Batman-lite, we can’t all wear designer jeans.”

The depth of sand lessens the closer they get to the outlet. Stray shopping carts peek out of drifts, upside down or crooked, wheels spinning weakly in the current of air. A hairless rat the size of a small dog scurries out from under an uprooted tree and Harry picks up the pace, trying and failing at not grabbing hold of Cisco’s sleeve.

“Vegetarian,” Cisco soothes him. “Well, usually.”

“You didn’t need to say the last part.”

Cisco pats his hand consolingly. The sand stops stinging his face when they are under the shadow of the building. The sign glows across cracked pavement. Harry tugs his mask off and breathes the cleaner air.

“But why a Target?” he wonders.

“Why a pyramid?” Cisco throws back at him as he stands in front of the automatic doors and waits. Nothing happens. He waves both arms, then sighs. “Both manmade structures,” Cisco offers as they each grab one door panel and pull. Sand pours out at their feet, burying them up to their knees and Harry vows to never go to a beach again. Ever. “My theory is that these are ruins from devastated timelines or tears in existing universes. I haven’t exactly had the time or the tools to research that yet.”

Harry glances at Cisco’s Mad Max cosplay.

“Clearly,” he says.

Cisco winks at him.

Buffered by the protective wall of the buildings, the storm is almost completely muted, and the lack of screeching winds is suddenly oppressive. Harry scrubs at his ears as he adjusts. Cisco shakes his flashlight until it works. The dull beam presents a store emptier than Harry would expect. Stores are actually much easier to cope with without all the people.

The checkout lines stand forgotten, rotten produce and piles of clothes still on the register conveyer belts. Shelves lay bare and picked over, covered with thick layers of dust. Cisco leads him to the gutted automotive section, where all that remains is a dirt-caked showcase truck and rows of toppled tire stacks. Cisco sighs hugely at the sight of the truck, shoulders collapsing. He tugs the duffel off Harry’s shoulder and drops into a crouch over it, unzipping it to pull out a dented can of beanie weenies. Cisco props the flashlight against the bag, beam cutting upward, and it stretches out his features with angled shadows. Harry crouches next to him as Cisco stabs the can open and it’s the happiest he’s even been in the face of certain botulism.

“It’s nighttime,” Cisco says, scooping the fingers in the can for another mouthful.

“How can you tell?” Harry asks around beanie weenies. His fingers brush slickly against Cisco’s knuckles as he fights for his share.

“You can’t feel it?” Cisco seems surprised, licking his knuckles.

“All I feel is cold.”

“Exactly,” Cisco says. “The light doesn’t change, but it’s colder at night. Hypothermia almost kills me way more often than the sand monsters.”

 “You used the plural,” Harry says warily. Cisco smiles cheekily and Harry scuttles closer, scanning the deserted aisles around them that are barely visible. Cisco hands him a pudding cup to distract him and it’s surprisingly effective.

“We should get some sleep,” Cisco says. “The rest of the way is mostly---up.”

Of course. He should have worn his knee brace.

Harry offers his hand to boost Cisco into the lifted truck, but Cisco snorts and uses the door to lever himself up and in. Harry swings inside and lets the door swing shut behind them. The flashlight goes out and it’s only the dim blue light that reaches them from the distant storefront windows. Cisco sighs deeply as he huddles on the passenger side, fingers tucked within his armpits. They shiver in the silence.

“I could start a fire,” Harry offers.

Cisco opens one eye.

“I have matches,” Harry clarifies. “We could burn shopping fliers.”

Cisco breathes out through his nose. “It would draw too much attention. Warm bodies are bad enough at attracting the wrong crowd. You could scoot a little closer, though.”

The wrong crowd. Harry wants elaboration on that, but Cisco’s teeth are chattering. Harry carefully slides across the bench seat and offers his side. Cisco hadn’t lied about the temperature dropping. Over the next hour, the cold becomes persistent, seeping in through the leaks in the filthy truck window to poke at Harry’s scrapes and bruises. Cisco starts snoring, head tipped against the bench seat, mouth gaping obnoxiously. He continues to tremble even in his sleep.

Harry pulls his cracked glasses off, sets them aside, and tugs Cisco under his arm. Cisco comes easily, eagerly even, and Harry stares into the dark and thinks about Cisco shivering himself to sleep in drafty forgotten places. Cisco tosses one leg over both of Harry’s. What a compelling little idiot.

Heat rises between their bodies until it’s almost comfortable. Cisco’s ridged muscles soften into a more familiar shape. Harry touches Cisco’s cheek and finds it warm and dry, so he relaxes and gets his palm under Cisco’s leathers to feel the small of his back. With his other hand, he cups the back of Cisco’s knee. Secured, he lets his cheek drop onto Cisco’s grimy scalp and passes out.

*

Harry wakes by reluctant degrees, pulled into awareness by a pleasurable tension raveling in his pelvis and gut. He becomes aware of warm, damp breath on his neck and the ragged scrape of nails circling his belly button. Harry cracks his eyes and clears the dry burn from his throat.

“Cisco,” he rasps against Cisco’s scalp.

Cisco tilts his head up and his eyes are narrow and sharp. Orbs of blue glow in the axis of his pupil and iris. Harry can’t tell if it’s a trick of the light or something else entirely. It steals the rest of Harry’s words. Cisco holds Harry’s gaze as he undoes the snap on Harry’s jeans, and Harry sucks in a breath, flattening his stomach. Cisco slips his clever fingers under the waist of Harry’s boxers. Harry slips down in the seat, spreads his legs and lifts his hips, and Cisco shoves outward with his forearm, opening space in the jeans to move his wrist.

He jacks Harry to a full erection and somewhere just beyond, where it hurts to linger. Harry kisses Cisco’s slick forehead, tastes the bitter salts leaking from Cisco’s pores. His lips pull back from his teeth.

“Shh,” Cisco whispers, breath sour and desperately welcome and Harry finds himself whimpering. “Let it feel good, Harry. It’s gonna feel so good.”

He’s right. He’s always so fucking right.

Harry comes messily. He splatters Cisco’s hand and arm and the flap of his boxers. He pants against Cisco’s hair in the aftermath and Cisco wipes them down with a dirty rag from within his bottomless duffel. The quiet dulls his senses. It’s speckled with the perspiration collecting under his clothes. He rubs Cisco’s back and thinks about pushing him down on the seat and ripping the duct tape on his pants apart, but Cisco shakes his head when Harry moves to kiss him and that hurts enough that Harry goes cold.

“I’m sore,” Cisco explains.

Harry pulls away to find his glasses. He licks his lips and can’t stand the taste of his own mouth.

“We should get moving,” Cisco says.

Harry tries to see through the dust-shrouded windows. “Is it morning?”

“As close it ever gets.” Cisco hands him a flattened protein bar. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

Cisco eats three fruit roll-ups on their way to the back of the store. In what was once a loading dock, Cisco shines his flashlight on the latch keeping the garage door shut. Harry gives the rusted metal a solid kick to force it open, then lifts, sliding the door toward the ceiling. Blue light floods the room and Harry squints his eyes against the glare.

“Well, the storm is over,” Harry says.

The horizon is clear again. Sand has settled along the slopes of the desert peacefully, tires littering the ascending hills. As Harry watches, one tire pops into the sky and bursts into red sparks. Not far off, the desert mounds thin and become rocky shores that lead to a steep black marble cliff with a set of rocks near the top that resembles a frowning face. It’s an imposing cliff, alive with personality like something out of a Tolkien novel. He doesn’t need Cisco to tell him that’s where they’re headed. Harry stretches side to side and pops his lumbar vertebrae while he absorbs the heat radiating from the liquid metal sky.

“The storm will hit again in a few days,” Cisco says, and he sounds tired. “It’s like this once a month. I thought I had a little longer, but I keep losing track.”

Harry side-eyes him. Cisco’s face, in this brighter light, is hollowed in new and meaningful ways. Cisco notices the attention and pushes his braid off his shoulder self-consciously, and Harry wants to take him home so badly it’s a bright flame in his chest.

“Time to go,” Harry says gruffly.

Cisco adjusts the duffel on his arm and takes his gun down, attaching it to his front instead. He meets Harry’s eyes with a little smile. “Now for the real fun.”

“We really need to analyze your definition of fun,” Harry says a short time later as he scales yet another cracked marble ledge. Cisco grunts above him, stretching out to fix another carabiner and feed the rope through. His glute muscles flex as he drags his body up the side of the cliff, and it’s much less appealing when observed at this altitude. Alright, he’s kidding himself. Cisco’s plump rear has gotten Harry through rougher ordeals. He’s always very thankful when something goes wrong with the Star Labs ventilation.

“Just be thankful we have rope,” Cisco says. “The first time I did this I didn’t.”

“I’ve never in my life given thanks for rope,” Harry says primly, butterflied to the rocks. Sweat burns his eyeballs. “I think we should discuss taking the long way around again.”

“Five minutes, Harry. It’s been five minutes since we had that conversation.”

Cisco dislodges a group of small stones and Harry shuts his eyelids before they pelt him in the face, followed by a handful of muck. It’s a both fortunate and unfortunate that his glasses are in Cisco’s duffel.

“I feel like it’s time to revisit it,” he says, spitting dirt.

“Too much for you, old man?” Cisco sounds winded himself. There’s a hysterical pitch under his words. “You should take up spinning. It’s great for the wind bags!”

Harry glances up to see Cisco wiggle his ass and sighs. Harry finds a handhold and starts pulling himself up again. Hand over hand, foot by foot. Rock climbing is standard second grade teaching on his earth, but like basic sewing, it’s been a while since he’s needed to call upon the skill. Everything hurts. Everything. When he checks again, Cisco’s arms are trembling with strain as he drags his body another yard. Harry hopes it’s just his nearsightedness playing tricks on him.

“Almost there,” Harry calls.

Cisco doesn’t reply. He doesn’t move at all. Harry shifts upward, reaching for the next visible groove. Cisco remains in place and yes, he’s shaking.

“Ramon?”

Harry flinches when something wet lands on his forehead. It’s warm and trickles and makes Harry want to rip his skin off. He risks letting go of the wall with one hand to wipe it and his fingers come away tacky and red. Harry’s foot slips and he drops, but the rope snags him before he realizes what’s happening. Heart pounding in belated panic, Harry swings himself back to the wall and reattaches, neck craned to keep within view. Cisco clings to the side of the cliff, unmoving except for his tremors.

“What’s going on?”

Cisco gurgles nonsensically. Blue light floods out around hands, suffusing the cuts of marble and making the entire cliffside glow. It pools down to Harry and wets his palms. Three of his fingers vanish within the cluster of luminescence. They’re about to drop through space and time and if there’s one thing Harry is certain of, it’s that things can always get worse.

“Snap out of it!” Harry yells as he starts to feel the tug between his eyebrows.

“I, I can’t,” Cisco croaks. “It hurts, Harry.”

“Yes, you can, Ramon. Reign it in!” Ok. Ok. Harry has seen this before. Cisco is a lot stronger than he’ll ever admit. “Where are you right now? Tell me where you are.”

“I’m…” Cisco moans and goes quiet.

“Say it!”

“I’m with you, asshole!”

“That’s right. Good job. You’re with me and we’re on a cliff you made me climb, so do me a favor and knock it off!”

Cisco takes several deep breaths and the warm puddle of his powers begins to wobble away, recollecting within the cage of Cisco’s palms. Cisco jolts from the impact and for a second Harry thinks Cisco’s going down and taking him out along the way, but instead of falling, Cisco slams his palm flat against the rocks and laughs manically, the same way he did when he crushed his hand rebuilding his cousin’s truck engine.

“Inhale and exhale,” Harry guides. “You can do this.”

“Shut up down there,” Cisco says, but he continues therapeutic breathing as he reaches to place the next carabiner. Like so, they scale the remaining hundred yards of the cliff. Harry stops feeling his own pain. He’s fixed on Cisco’s lurching ascent, one ledge at a time, until at last Cisco crests the top and pulls himself over and his feet disappear, plastic bag socks and all. Harry exhales hugely and smacks his forehead against jagged marble a couple of times just to give thanks to the universe.

“Nice work, Ramon,” Harry says, grinning at the rocks. “Hey, you hear me? I’m acknowledging your contribution. You want to record this somehow?”

No sniping remark nags him from above. The rope remains motionless against the rocks. There’s nothing to do but climb the rest of the way up, so Harry does, in a mad shuffle that leaves him stinging and bruised. When Harry reaches the final ridge and finds himself in the lush forest Cisco had promised, his ears start ringing and stomach acid rushes up his throat. Cisco waits in the grass a short distance away, legs bent inward. His duffel lays abandoned next to him, strap in a puddle.

Harry stumbles to his feet, trips, and crashes back down. He reaches out and wraps his fingers around Cisco’s ankle and shakes it. It waggles limply like a dead fish. Hissing, Harry lets Cisco’s foot flop on the grass.

“No,” Harry says.

He crawls Cisco’s body to blink thoughtlessly at his sunken face. He watched Cisco refasten his braid this morning when it became too loose. A tender breeze cards through the strands that have broken free. They tickle the bridge of Harry’s nose. On autopilot, Harry touches two fingers to under Cisco’s chin and bets his own life. Behind the prickle of beard, Cisco’s pulse reaches for Harry. Humbled and weary of it, he shuts his eyes and hides his face in Cisco’s shoulder. A rustle from the bush manufactures some stray energy. Harry peers for the source, but just sees trees that flicker and fade, like a software glitch.

*

Cisco doesn’t wake. Harry waits, checking Cisco’s pulse every few minutes. Cisco barely moves, but a fever builds within him and his heart rate and breathing spikes sharply. Harry removes his jacket and uses it to pillow Cisco’s head. He takes Cisco’s gun and sets it aside. He does a cursory check of Cisco head to toe, but Harry’s not that kind of doctor and he finds nothing in the scrapes and bruises to account for Cisco’s condition. Not that this is the kind of place to be commanded by the science Harry is most familiar with.

Harry wipes the sweat off Cisco’s forehead with his sleeve and Cisco shivers, dry lips catching on his own teeth. Harry rasps his thumb across Cisco’s bottom lip to free it. It’s almost certainly a reaction to the stress his body is under, existing in two places at once, one timeline significantly ahead of the other. Harry touches the clammy skin above Cisco’s prefrontal cortex, where this Cisco connects to the one at home.

“You shouldn’t have opened that breach,” Harry says.

When an hour passes, Harry digs the canteen out of Cisco’s bag and lifts Cisco’s head to feed him water. He rubs Cisco’s throat to make him swallow.

“So, what do you think?” Harry asks him. “We have maybe eight hours of warm weather left and you said it’s a two day walk. I need to get us somewhere more protected. There’s the forest right there. I know the general direction of the temple from here. Should I keep us moving while you nap?”

Cisco frowns, puckering.

“On the other hand, we could get eaten,” Harry says. “What would Wells 2.0 do? No, that’s a terrible thought. I’m not doing that.”

Harry gives it another twenty minutes and feels Cisco’s forehead again. It’s hot enough to melt hafnium and his pulse bounds under Harry’s fingertips. Harry counts the beats to pass more time. Eventually he gets sick of himself. Harry pulls Cisco’s duffel close and digs through it to take inventory. Under a box of bullets, he sees a square object wrapped in silver film. His fingertips hover over the shape of it. It’s warm and vibrates gently within its wrapper. Harry sits back on heels and stares at it.

“Or we could go home,” Harry says blankly. “I could trigger your reflexes and make you open a rift. There are ways to do that, but I haven’t wanted to scare you. You’d be furious, wouldn’t you? You couldn’t soak up the guilt anymore. You’d probably try to come back as soon as you woke up.” Harry smiles a little. “Not that there would be the point, because I’d have the source. Cynthia would have to find another one or come to us on our terms. My terms.”

It’s thoughts like these that, when spoken aloud, make daughters send their fathers to alternate universes.

Cisco shifts, arm flopping out. He smacks Harry in the thigh and Harry turns to him. Cisco’s arm is prone, paler on the underside. Harry knows where to kiss it to make Cisco cry laughing and pull away, but he can’t make Cisco wake up, can’t make Cisco see sense, and can’t make Cisco do pretty much anything. Not without losing his trust. Harry tucks the bullets back over the source and shuts the bag. Cisco mutters to himself, Harry’s own personal life-size Jiminy Cricket.

“Oh, shut up,” Harry sighs and gets to his feet, knees popping. “Time to go.”

He hangs the duffle on the front of his body and crouches with his back to Cisco’s knees. With a lot of grunting and more lumbar power than he’s had to utilize in recent years, Harry gets Cisco draped over him. Cisco keeps trying to slip off him like flop sweat, but Harry manages to hitch him up and, hunching forward, keeps Cisco in place, even if his spine is never going to forgive him. Harry moves slowly toward the forest edge, scanning the brush. Treetops filter the blue light and transmit dark green shade.

“It’s alright,” Harry grumps at Cisco’s limp face near his own. “We’re doing things your way as always, Ramon.”

 

 

 

 

> _Jesse sent Harry a birthday cube instead of visiting. It was fine._
> 
> _“Cold,” Wells 2.0 said dully. “I’m beaming with pride.”_
> 
> _“No one asked you,” Harry bit out as he replayed the cube for the fourth time. She was very sorry that she couldn’t come, but she hoped that he was having a great day. Tell everyone she missed them. She loved him. Tell Cisco he better visit soon._
> 
> _“She’s busy,” Harry explained at length, for the sixth time. “I’ve had a lot of birthdays. I can’t expect her at every single one. That’s ridiculous.”_
> 
> _Wells 2.0 picked at his teeth with a piece of bone._
> 
> _“What’s ridiculous?” Cisco said, swinging in with his hands behind his back. He was wearing an outrageous button-up shirt with pink pineapples emblazoned everywhere._
> 
> _“That shirt is,” Harry said. He slammed the cube shut. Jesse’s smiling and waving hologram winked out. Time to get back to work._
> 
> _“Wow,” Cisco said. “Good to see you too, buddy.” He acknowledged Wells 2.0 with a nod and Wells 2.0 saluted via knife. “So, I’m very sorry about this.”_
> 
> _Harry looked up and found Cisco wincing theatrically. “You’re sorry?”_
> 
> _“I kind of planned a surprise birthday party for you,” Cisco admitted sheepishly._
> 
> _Harry tore out of the chair, sending it hurtling across the room on squeaky wheels._
> 
> _“What? When?”_
> 
> _“Well.” Cisco shrugged and pulled a cupcake from behind his back, lit up with a single sparkling candle. “Right now? Surprise!”_
> 
> _Cisco began to sing. Harry backed away like Cisco had a grenade._
> 
> _Voices rose up behind him. Holograms flickered to life from every corner of the room, joining in noisily. Jesse and her new team were among them. The rest of Harry’s friends piled through the door. Joe and Snow. Allen and Iris. That idiot Dibney. Cisco wrestled him down to the height of the cupcake and made him blow it out, but Harry struggled, laughing so hard he could barely breathe. He couldn’t do it._
> 
> _“I got your back, Boo,” Cisco whispered to him on the sly and blew it out for him, splattering frosting everywhere._
> 
> _Cisco stepped back and bowed, holding the cupcake up on a flat palm. It was that stupid face he made at that moment. That was the moment. His stupid face and the stupid gaps between his teeth. That tipped the scales for Harry. Before that moment, he’d labored under the false belief that he would be okay, but it turned out he’d have to have Cisco after all._
> 
> _“I got yours, too,” Harry promised, too serious, and it must have been all on his face because Cisco’s expression tripped and reset. He looked nervous._

 

The forest moves with sound and color. A kaleidoscope of bugs skitters away from Harry’s stomping boots. Cisco sleeps soundly against Harry’s back as Harry follows the path of least resistance through the lush green undergrowth, a subtle incline through moss and sapphire flowers. Above the drapery of tree branches, Harry still hears the occasional destruction of something hurling itself at the barrier and catches a burst of bright color, but the forest seems to exist a step away from the drama unfolding above it.

An hour into the trip, Harry heeds the call of a waterfall and takes a break to piss. He props Cisco against the trunk of a tree, arranges his arms in his lap and brushes his hair away from his face, then stands to his full height and pops his spine. Taking his time, Harry rinses his hands off in the water and fills the canteen. He rests on his heels for a moment and watches neon fish slip around stones and downstream. When he returns to Cisco, his forehead feels cooler to the touch.

“Enjoy your vacation,” Harry mutters. “I’m going to make you do my heavy lifting for the next year, Ramon. Don’t think I’m not going to make you pay and pay and pay.”

Cisco’s eyes shift under the lids, eyebrows twitching. His chest rises and falls peacefully. A squirrel-adjacent creature scrambles up the tree behind his head and freezes in place when Harry makes eye contact with it. Harry claps his hands and it jumps away. Harry gets Cisco to swallow more water and swipes the overspill away with his thumb.

“Ok, climb aboard the Harrison Express.” He loops Cisco’s arms around his neck. Cisco’s heart beats steady and strong against Harry’s spine. “That’s my boy.”

He walks and walks until his calves cramp and his arms tremble under Cisco’s weight. He tries to keep his path as straight as he can, but he has no real way of ensuring he’s not deviating. Up is the general direction he takes. If he goes up, he’s making progress. Cisco can thank him later.

Harry narrates several theories he has about The Thinker because Cisco is uncommonly poor company and it keeps Harry from losing his mind. It’s more productive to believe that Cisco’s sleep and silence reflect the meticulous work of Cisco’s brain as it heals his body from the trauma of the vibe. Cisco’s brain and Cisco’s body have never gotten along very well. Occasionally, Cisco’s brilliance short circuits his physiology and his body becomes a tool his mind uses to translate an idea to his hands.

Harry has seen it. Cisco will stop walking mid-step, foot raised in the air, and Harry will quit whatever he’s doing and wait for the spark to move from Cisco’s brain to his mouth and to Harry’s own mouth until he’s completing the thought. That feedback loop is closed right now. Cisco’s feet sway unenthusiastically by Harry’s hips, toes dangling like a child. Harry talks himself hoarse defensively.

The trail he follows leads Harry past a group of questionable ceramic garden gnomes holding pitchforks inside a hollow tree trunk. The tallest one has lost its nose and three of its fingers. Harry scowls at it and holds Cisco tighter as he steps over a fallen branch.

It’s hours before Harry slows down. When his body starts to fail him, pure irritation keeps him moving forward and Harry mines deeper and deeper for anger, but even his self-hatred isn’t limitless. His vision tunnels and his breath sounds take the place of ranting. Cisco coughs suddenly, breaking the silence, and it startles Harry so hard he almost throws him off. He wrenches his back to keep from catapulting them both down a ravine.

“You just get your beauty sleep, Ramon,” Harry gasps, wobbling on the edge of the steep drop. “I’ll take care of this.”

Up and up. He crosses a stone bridge. He avoids another bridge because it glitches threateningly in way reminiscent of the pyramid. It takes at least twenty minutes to find an alternate way across the river. His chest aches with each inhale. Cisco keeps slipping too low, forcing Harry to pause and resituate him. It’s difficult to get going again.

Harry’s body goes numb. He wouldn’t have noticed his leg give out between one step and the next if it hadn’t taken the rest of him down with it, sending him plunging to his hands and knees. Cisco’s weight takes him the final distance to the dirt and he lands half on the duffel, half on his side. Cisco grunts and squirms, but otherwise doesn’t react. Harry huffs and a tangle of leaves pirouette away.

That’s all he’s got. He’s done.

Harry lingers in the dirt. It takes a while to catch his breath and his muscles flare to life one at a time, hot and sore. He’s too old for this shit. Too old and too damn smart to be running around a magical realm with Cisco Ramon to stop his latent lover from destroying herself. Harry deserves a nap. He’d settle for a hug; Cisco smothering him doesn’t count. Harry shoves Cisco off and Cisco responds by huddling into a pile of leaves and sticks as if it’s a fluffy cloud, sighing softly. Harry glares at him, but even that makes his head hurt.

Groaning, Harry heaves and rolls and makes like a crab as he gets to his feet. His knee throbs alarmingly as he stands so he lifts his weight off it and fingers it gingery through his jeans. Ouch. Damn it. So this is as far as his body will bring them.

He puts his hands on his hips and looks around. Blue light presses curiously through the tree branches. A glitch opens a square of space every so often and gives Harry a view of the metallic sky. Trees and rocks and dirt. Most of the small woodland creatures have slunk away to warm, muddy holes, leaving only the stray snake to drop off branches and slither away. There’s nothing to provide cover from the incoming weather.

Harry looks at the path ahead and then turns in the direction they came from. He doesn’t know what’s ahead, but he’d seen a cave twenty minutes ago and he doesn’t care for death by hypothermia.

It takes more than twenty minutes to reach the cave again. Several more explosions shatter the silence above the forest canopy. Harry’s knee swells so fat he can’t bend it and every step with Cisco on his back feels like glass being crushed inside the joint. Only a few minutes in and Harry starts panting, perspiration drenching the fabric between Cisco’s chest and Harry’s back. The last time he sweated this much was under friendlier conditions and involved a lot more energy from Cisco.

The cave smells like dead fish when Harry finally reaches it, but it’s dry and deep enough that Harry can start a fire later without attracting Cisco’s wrong crowd. Harry can’t carry Cisco another step, so he drags him. One of Cisco’s shoes comes off in the battle. Harry props him against the cave wall to push it back on, minus the plastic bag, and Cisco’s damp toes make him want to cry. Harry presses his thumb to the arch of Cisco’s foot.

“Any time, Ramon,” Harry whispers. “I did so many things wrong today. Time to wake up and yell at me.”

Cisco drifts sideways. Harry scrapes his eye sockets with his fists and tells himself to get a grip. He drags Cisco deeper into the cave. Deeper still. The light from the opening grows dim and watery. When he can’t move another inch, Harry collapses with Cisco on the ground and presses hard on his mangled knee, muffling a whine behind his teeth. It’s so inflamed he can feel it beneath the jeans. Harry breathes through his nose and slaps the slate ground until some of the pain ebbs away.

Time passes.

He gives Cisco the final dregs of water and takes off his jacket again to pillow Cisco’s head. Harry hobbles to his feet and shakes the empty canteen. The duffel has a few stray packets of snack food, but nothing substantial. Harry takes the gun and limps to the edge of the cave, where the light is, and looks back. Cisco is a blurry shape in the dark, half shattered by Harry’s broken lens. He doesn’t want to leave him, but he can’t take Cisco with him and he can’t stay if they want to make it through the next day.

The space snakes don’t make an appearance. Harry fills up the canteen in a small strip of moving water and eyeballs the low hanging branches and the holes in the ground. He wouldn’t have predicted a desperate craving for snakes-on-a-stick had he been asked a few days ago, but life between realms changes a man. As Harry is about to start poking around in the mud to try to stir up some lizards or beetles, something that looks very much like a pig sloughs through the moss and mud at the top of a sharp slope.

Harry goes still when he spots it. It nuzzles a pile of damp sticks and tips a log, sending it crashing down the hill. Harry uses the noise to dive toward a wider tree. He hides behind it for a moment just in case, then peeks around and finds the pig chewing on a slimy lizard, orange and purple tail flailing wildly between its stiff lips. Harry digs the gun out of the bag and raises it hesitantly. The pig throws its head up and snaps its jaws down and the lizard goes still. Harry gags silently. That’s not the breakfast ham he’s familiar with. Maybe space snake was a better idea.

Harry lowers the gun and steps back. A twig snaps under Harry’s boot. Harry looks at it and then lifts his head. The pig returns his stare with flat, black eyes. Anxiety flares weakly in Harry’s stomach and the heavy hair on the pig lifts like porcupine quills. Its lips pull back from gnarled, jagged teeth stained purple by the lizard blood.

“Bullshit,” Harry says, too tired to be more than annoyed.

It shrieks like a bird and charges.

Harry stumbles backward as the hellish creature grunts and screams down the hill, leveling young trees and scattering mud in its wake. It’s fast. Too fast. Harry steps backward again and his knee turns wrong, locks, and Harry goes down. The gun jolts from his hand and Harry flops onto his belly, scrambling after it. He catches it up, flicks the safety off and turns just as the pig reaches his boot. It snarls, jaw raging open wide enough to show its second set of teeth near its gullet and Harry shoots it in the throat. It lands on Harry’s legs, dead weight, jolting Harry’s bad leg.

Harry kicks it away to ooze blood in the bushes, so Harry can bend over and puke up breakfast without the company.

Jesse has always been the gifted hunter in the family.

After this, Harry plans to stick to salads for a while.

*

Harry stares deeply into the fire as it dances and snaps and loses himself for a while. He finds himself somewhere in the past with his daughter: her birthday maybe, or a dress up party; anyway, she’s wearing a rose-gold crown and waving a wand and his love for her is so pointed it’s not surprising it cuts. Beside him, at long last, Cisco stirs and makes a lip-smacking noise.

Harry turns to him, expecting little, so he nearly falls over when Cisco’s eyes crack open above flushed cheeks. His forehead wrinkles when he sees Harry. He shifts, trying to sit up, but he goes white when he lifts his head and flops back down, moaning.

“Settle down there, Ramon,” Harry advises, reaching for him. His hands tremble. He clenches them and brings them back into his own lap. More of that sharp love no one wants pointed their way.

“Harry,” Cisco rasps and coughs.

Harry rolls his eyes. “What did I just say?”

Cisco rustles around stubbornly, coughing and hacking. Harry sighs and helps Cisco sit up slowly, bracing him with his arm and shoulder until Cisco obtains a dubious measure of balance. Cisco blinks fuzzily, face close to his own, brown eyes big and wet, and Harry’s heart thumps hard. Damn. He pushes Cisco’s braid to the side and settles his fingers against the notch behind Cisco’s ear where it’s warm, but not with the awful heat from before.

“Good to see you,” Harry says gruffly. “I was starting to think you’d nap all day.”

Cisco glances around cautiously. “I’m confused,” he admits.

“Allow me to explain. You, the intrepid hero, set out on a quest to rescue a princess from a dragon---”

“I can still find the energy to punch you in the dick.”

“You passed out after the cliff.” Harry takes the opportunity to wipe some of the dirt off Cisco’s face with his sleeve. “You stayed passed out. I carried you here.”

“You carried me.” Cisco presses the ball of his palm against his eye socket. “And here is… a cave, clearly. And that’s a fire. That’s a fire. For real.”

“You’re doing great,” Harry says dryly. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Cisco shoves Harry’s hand out of his face and scoots precariously close to the fire, reaching for it with his palms. His black hair gleams orange. He shuts his eyes and inhales deeply. Harry stares without shame. Cisco’s eyelids drift open slowly, a dim echo of pleasure.

“That’s nice, Harry,” Cisco says. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a fire? I don’t even care if the bone gremlins eat my face because of it.”

“The, um—well, that’s just---” Harry clears his throat. “Don’t get too close, Ramon, you’ll lose your beard.” Cisco hums under his breath and ignores him, so Harry scoots up next to him and puts an arm lightly around his waist. Cisco looks at him from the corner of his eye. “How do you feel? You were unconscious most of the day.”

“Most of the day? Wow. Um. Like someone beat me with a stuffed pillow for several hours.” Cisco touches his temple and winces. “Also, like maybe there was some vodka involved.”

Harry feels Cisco’s forehead with the back of his hand. Cisco’s beard lifts as he smiles a little, a hint of spark igniting behind eyes. Harry ignores Cisco’s amusement and checks Cisco’s carotid pulse, then both his wrists. Cisco’s neuronal web might be collapsing, but at least his heart rate is steady. Harry lingers, wishing he had a spare Caitlin Snow kicking around. Are Cisco’s pupils normally that wide?

Cisco wiggles his fingers. “Am I going to live, doctor?” Harry drops Cisco’s wrists in disgust, but Cisco snatches Harry’s hand before he gets very far. “Sorry, sorry, I’m a jerk. Thank you for taking care of me. I know what this place is like. It was uncool of me to leave you here alone. Look at you. You’re covered in dry mud and---is that blood? I hope the other guy looks worse.”

Harry watches Cisco play with his hand, measuring the length from one knuckle to the next. His hand is big next to Cisco’s, caked with dirt and space pig blood, but they have matching silver scars. Sharp tools and blow torches. Late nights.

“I thought about finding her to give her the source,” Harry says.

Cisco doesn’t lift his gaze. He touches one of Harry’s shiny burns. It looks like the new one Cisco has on his thumb from last week’s small chemical fire. A part of Harry wants to pull away, but he doesn’t do that anymore. The time for that is over.

“I don’t care about her,” Harry continues. “If she lives or if she dies, that’s not a concern I have and I think you know that. But I care about you. You need to be more careful or this place is going to kill you.”

“You didn’t give it to her,” Cisco says. Harry shakes his head. “Good move, Harry. I would have been pretty pissed at you.” Harry shrugs, because that hadn’t played a part in Harry’s decision. Cisco turns Harry’s hand over, lacing their fingers together. Harry doesn’t let his breath catch and after a pause Cisco smiles up at him. “How about this? I won’t let anything happen to me if you don’t let anything happen to you. It will be a ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours’ kind of situation.”

“I actually have some self-preservation instincts, unlike most of the people I work with each day.”

Cisco lifts their joined hands and presses them to his mouth. His scraggly beard is rough, but his lips are warm and slightly damp. Harry looks away, to a corner of the cave where the light doesn’t reach. Cisco’s tenderness takes his skin off.

“There’s meat,” Harry says, arm stiff. “I had a little run in with some space pig. It didn’t turn out well for the pig. Can you eat something? Cisco?”

“Hold on, I’m trying to make my stomach growl for comedic effect.”

Harry shoves him gently. “Idiot,” he says, but it feels like he says something else.

Cisco eats a little and forces some water down. Harry updates him and they come up with an estimate of how much ground they’ve covered. Harry complains about his back and his knees and Cisco apologizes, dryly, for being dead weight, and Harry tells him he’s used to doing the heavy lifting in their partnership and Cisco says he’ll show Harry heavy lifting and they bicker like that until Cisco yawns hugely, showing off his tonsils, and Harry stares until his eyes sting.

“Go back to sleep,” Harry says. “One more day and we can go home. If she shows.”

Cisco stares at the fire. “She’ll be there. I feel her.”

Harry doesn’t like how that sounds.

“Come feel me,” he says and shifts back from the fire. He drags the duffel toward him and uses it as a pillow when he lays down, leaving one arm outstretched. Cisco looks at him with one lifted eyebrow. The fire crackles. Harry can tell Cisco wants to, so Harry pats his chest.

Cisco tosses the rest of the meat into the fire and crawls toward him, scuffing up dirt. He turns his back to Harry and drops down on his side. His head ghosts Harry’s shoulder, only the faintest inconvenience. Harry covers Cisco’s ear with his hand and presses until he feels the full weight of Cisco’s skull settle on him. It’s his own business if he says a prayer for the sanctity of the treasure inside.

“How many bullets did you use on that pig,” Cisco mumbles, voice vibrating Harry’s chest. “I think I ate one. Your aim is shit.”

Harry pats his bristly cheek. “Go to sleep, Ramon.”

Cisco grumbles and wriggles against him. Harry scuffs his palm over Cisco’s shoulder, down his arm and onto his waist, and eventually Cisco ends his angry worm imitation. The fire staggers under a gust of cold air from the mouth of the cave. Harry tucks his face against Cisco’s nape and inhales the stale fever smell. He hurts everywhere bony prominences press on the ground and his knee low-key throbs with every heartbeat. It doesn’t matter.

What does it say about him that even now he can find his happiness here, counting the space between Cisco’s ribs? He shuts his eyes.

Being kissed wakes Harry up sometime before the day brings the heat back. The fire has collapsed to faded embers and Cisco’s outline is barely visible in the dark as he kisses his way from Harry’s mouth to his throat, scratching Harry’s skin with his beard. Harry lifts his hands and digs through the hair close to Cisco’s scalp. There’s no question of Cisco’s welcome. Harry spreads his legs.

“Be careful,” he whispers when Cisco climbs over him. Cisco ignores him and notches them together, thighs bracketing Harry’s hips. Cisco makes love to him unhurriedly with the stiff fabric of their clothes shelled away. He winds Harry up slowly with his hands and his mouth, flashing wicked grins at him that catch the dying glow of the fire. He leaves drying streaks of saliva on the skin he bares. Harry keeps him careful and slow and can’t keep the fear off his face when Cisco’s breathing starts rasping. Cisco’s knee bumps Harry’s bad one, but Harry comes anyway, making a sticky mess of their stomachs. Cisco moves urgently on top of him after, with taut, anxious plunges of his hips, and then he holds himself stiff and Harry presses down on the small of Cisco’s back as he shudders.

They wipe themselves down with canteen water and a sock. It’s still cold, so it’s not morning yet. Cisco traces Harry’s eyebrows and down the ridge of his nose, perfectly silent, and Harry can’t think of a single thing to say. He escapes into sleep. The next time Cisco wakes him up it’s with a handful of stale chocolate-covered raisins.

“Morning,” Harry says. Cisco only nods back, busy repacking the duffle. His braid looks different, tighter, and there’s more color in his face today, but not by much. “I’d kill for a coffee.”

Cisco groans. “Don’t start,” he says.

The dry mud in Harry’s hair makes his scalp itch. Harry cleans the smudges off his glasses and cracks his neck. He hobbles to his feet. Cisco zips the duffel. Time to go.

*

Harry breaks off a branch and uses it to limp up the ever-steeper incline. Cisco sticks close to his elbow and Harry almost snaps at him that he’s fine when he notices how carefully Cisco walks, the ginger repositioning of his center of gravity as he takes a step. They push forward. Harry’s stiff jeans chafe his thighs and there’s a spot on his back that he can’t reach to scratch. Cisco doesn’t look much better and he definitely smells worse. There are actual twigs caught in his braid. If Cynthia is faring any better, and she almost certainly is, she’ll be able to crush them without breaking a sweat.

The morning, if that’s what it is, edges toward the triple digits and makes him long for the nighttime temperatures. Hey, he tells himself, at least it’s not a giant sandstorm full of cruel mechanical beasts. They make slow progress. Without the weight of Cisco on his back, Harry gets a chance to look around. Flowers. Plants. Beetles the size of his fist that Harry’s sure Grodd would think of as a delicacy.

“There!” Harry says, and stabs a finger at a bush. “It just glitched right there. Why does it do that?”

Cisco mops his forehead with his arm and peers where Harry points.

“Probably some disturbance in the force,” Cisco says seriously, then dances away when Harry flicks him. “Why are you asking me? I don’t know. I just work here.”

“Forgive me for having faith in your intellect,” Harry says. “My deepest apologies.”

Cisco sticks out his tongue and Harry restrains himself from trying to bite it.

Just when Harry decides to let himself get bored, they pass something that looks suspiciously like a yellow brick road tucked away in heavy undergrowth. Cisco pauses and scratches his beard at it. Eventually he shakes his head and moves on. Harry side-eyes it until it’s out of sight.

“The Wizard of Oz was a movie,” Cisco says, just putting it out there.

“Yes,” Harry agrees instantly. “Just a movie.”

“Huh,” Cisco says.

By early afternoon, they’re swatting at mosquitoes that sing at them soothingly to try to win them over, and Harry wishes Allen was with them. He crosses oceans before Harry can put the right amount of sugar in Cisco’s coffee (to be fair, it’s a lot of sugar). Maybe Harry shouldn’t have left him in a state of semi-coma in that random basement that time. Harry winces when he thinks about it. That’s going to have repercussions.

One of the singing mosquitoes hovers close to Cisco’s ear and says something that has Cisco swinging his arms wildly and pulling at his own hair. Harry stops to watch. Cisco stomps in a circle and then slams his arms down and glares at thin air. He’s pulled a good chunk of hair free from the braid and it stands up around his red face. Harry swings the stick in a circle and looks pointedly away, clearing his throat.

“Ok, that’s it,” Cisco says. He cuts sideways through a dense green patch.

Harry finds him at the edge of a wide burbling river surrounded by giant yellow flowers that are as big as Cisco himself. He’s ankle deep where the grass gives way to muddy sand. The water throws a distorted reflection back at them. Rocks break through the surface on the opposite shore, froth bubbling around them.

Harry leans on the stick, waiting. He yawns.

“You ok there, buttercup?” Harry asks when it seems like Cisco should be done gaping at the water. Cisco sends him a baleful look, then pulls his braid in front of him and starts the arduous process of unknotting it.

“No way,” Harry says. “Nope. Not happening”

Cisco cocks his chin stubbornly.

“Ramon, please. That water will probably glitch and your ass will end up in Canada.”

“Canada isn’t so bad,” Cisco says thoughtfully. “What? You don’t want to see me naked? Cover your eyes then. You’re as gross as me, which is frankly disturbing considering I have been here six hundred percent longer than you.”

“First off, that’s not nice.” Harry throws his hands up and waves them around. “Secondly, I am not stripping down when there are space snakes and rats the size of beagles, and, and sand monsters and—” Harry points randomly— “your ex-girlfriend is lurking somewhere.”

“She’s waited this long. She can wait until you smell pretty again.”

Harry scoffs. “Pretty,” he complains. Then scoffs again.

Cisco tips his head sideways and yanks his fingers through his hair with a little yelp. It makes Harry think of Jesse, the summer before she started first grade, when he could never force a comb through her hair unless he let her comb his first.

“This is a really bad idea,” Harry insists. “Who knows what’s swimming in that river?”

Cisco turns away from him and starts plucking his shoes off like a dare. He leaves the awful plastic bags stuffed inside them and unbuckles and unzips his leathers. They hit the dirt with a slapping sound. A whole lot of skin bares itself in the murky green and blue light. Shadows from overhead branches dapple his thighs and back with transient bruises. The ridges of his spine gnaw at the open air and he looks back at Harry, waiting.

“Space bacteria, here I come,” Harry mutters.

He tosses the stick aside and tries to bend down to remove his boots. His knee flares bright and hot, and Harry winces, cupping the front of it to siphon off the pain. Harry feels a light touch on his shoulder and lifts his head. Cisco gestures and Harry frowns, standing up straight. Cisco keeps his face tilted upward as he crouches and places both hands on top of Harry’s boot. Harry’s ribcage expands slowly. This feels like one of those moments he should keep his mouth shut.

Cisco tugs the laces open with a smooth jerk and then does the same to the other boot. Harry uses Cisco’s shoulders for balance to step out of them. Cisco runs his hands up the back of Harry’s legs and Harry feels his skin reach for Cisco through the fabric of his jeans. Cisco cups his ass gently then pulls his hands around Harry’s hips and starts undoing the buckle. Harry sucks in his breath as Cisco undoes the snap and zipper as well. He’d get hard, but his knee really does hurt, and this doesn’t seem like that kind of thing.

Cisco doesn’t grope him. He unbends and starts pushing Harry’s jacket from his shoulders. It drops heavily to Harry’s feet in a jangle of zipper and buttons. Cisco lifts Harry’s wrists gently and pushes them above their heads. Cisco gives them a brief, firmer squeeze, so Harry leaves them raised. Cisco smiles with his eyes, their noses brushing. Harry feels his mouth part to say who knows what, but Cisco shakes his head.

When Harry doesn’t speak, Cisco drags the flat of his palms down Harry’s arms, stopping at the tender underside of his triceps, where he falters, fingertips just barely tracing. Harry tires not to squirm. Cisco abruptly deviates, plucking Harry’s glasses from his nose. The world goes out of focus, but he hears Cisco fold the ears shut and step away. Harry leaves his arms up and when Cisco returns, he pulls the shirt over Harry’s head from the waist, fingertips dragging skin. It’s the kindest, sweetest way Harry has ever been electrocuted. He shudders and Cisco hums.

“Should we.” Harry swallows. “We should hurry.”

“I’m busy, Harry,” Cisco says primly.

“You’re toying with me,” Harry says.

Cisco fingers the line of Harry’s spine.

“I like you,” Cisco says. “I think I really like you a lot. It’s kind of annoying.”

He tucks his wide, warm palms inside the waist of Harry’s jeans, under the elastic of Harry’s boxers. A gentle nudge, and gravity takes both to his ankles. Harry stands there, naked with Cisco, the both of them covered in dirt and scratches and blood. It’s not exactly a fantasy of his, but not so far off that Harry can’t appreciate the likeness.

Cisco leans into Harry while looking up, coming into focus. He flicks the hair away from his face and smiles enough to show the space between his bottom teeth, and Harry cups Cisco’s cheeks and rumbles low in his throat as he bends to meet the kiss.

The collection of Harry’s high points grows to include another moment.

The water, at its deepest, reaches Harry’s mid-thigh. Cisco dips low enough that it covers him up to his chest and tilts his head back, letting the rushing water pull the sediment from his hair. Harry soaks his knee and stands guard. Some of the pain seeps away into the water and he allows that maybe this wasn’t the worst idea Cisco’s ever had.

Cisco circles Harry, constant rotation, while Harry stands as the axis, arms over his chest.

“Your mud has mud on it, Harry,” Cisco says, splashing wet fingers at him.

“I like my mud where it is,” Harry argues, completely aware he’s already lost.

Cisco circles him again. The water sloshes against Harry’s buttocks and lower back when Cisco reaches a cold wet arm around Harry and pulls him backwards into the water. Harry lets Cisco drown him. The water feels warmer when he comes up for air, and Harry settles in. He lets Cisco scrub through his hair, turning his head when Cisco nudges him. When they crawl out of the water, they leave the dirt behind, and all that’s left is scattered bruises and scratches. Cisco has a burn on the outside of his thigh that wasn’t there the last time Harry saw him naked.

They dry out on the side of the stream. Cisco sits cross legged to strain the water from his hair and rebraid it. Harry puts his marginally functional glasses back on so he has the pleasure of watching. Cisco’s tendons flex and relax compellingly. Cisco’s arms were the second thing Harry noticed about him. The first, of course, being his mouth.

“We should get going soon,” Cisco says. “We need to reach the temple before it gets cold again.”

“Still blowing it up?”

“Into the sky,” Cisco says dreamily. “She won’t be able to use it and I can finally go home. I want potato chips, Harry. Do you know how long it’s been since I had fried food?”

Harry hums and runs a finger down Cisco’s naked back. Cisco arches away, goosebumps breaking out everywhere, and Harry feels a curl of pleasure in his gut that is far from innocent. Cisco chuckles and turns, mouth open to scold, but he freezes like that, wet braid unfinished in his hand. Harry sits up straighter, pleasure spinning out like a flat tire.

“What?” Harry says. He grasps Cisco’s shoulder when he doesn’t answer. “Are you vibing something? What is it?”

Cisco drops his braid and reaches out. He touches two fingers just above Harry’s upper lip and pulls his hand back slightly. Bright red blood clings to Cisco’s fingertips and drips down the side. As if Cisco had plucked a string, a rattle reaches up from deep within Harry’s chest to answer. He coughs once, wetly, and blood splatters Cisco’s face, staining him.

“Get dressed,” Cisco says flatly. Red drips from his eyelashes into the white sclera of his wide eyes. He stands abruptly, looming over Harry on the rock. “Did you hear me?”

“It’s just a nose bleed,” Harry says. He sweeps his hand over his nose. “I nearly broke my back carrying you most of the way here and you’re worried about a nose bleed?”

Cisco appears unmoved. “I should throw your ass back home right now.”

Harry feels his eyes widen. He gets to his feet and he has maybe four inches on Cisco and is arguably more intelligent, but Cisco is unfortunately fierce, and he sounds like he means it. He’s ready to send Harry home over a goddamn nosebleed.

“A breach right now might kill you,” Harry reminds him. “How would Cynthia be saved without your dashing heroics?”

Cisco snatches his pants off the rocks and yank them on. When Harry gets dressed, he makes sure to tuck Cisco’s gun away inside his jacket, because honestly, of the two of them, Harry is the better shot, mostly because he doesn’t mind hitting the target. Cisco doesn’t seem to notice, intent on taping his clothes back together.

The pace thereafter is brutal. Cisco moves like he wasn’t a vegetable yesterday, pushing them faster and faster as the trail edges closer to a straight up climb through thorn bushes and moss-covered rocks. Harry starts to see pink spots and Cisco gets further ahead. Sweat shines on the back of his neck.

 “Cisco!” Harry picks up a flat stone and chucks it Cisco’s back. “This is not appropriate behavior for a graduate of the Superhero Teamwork Exercise Program.”

Cisco doesn’t laugh. He also doesn’t miss a step. Harry throws another rock at him because while it might not slow Cisco down, it still feels good. He manages to catch up when Cisco trips over a root, offers a helping hand, but Cisco shakes him off, glaring with a red face. Harry takes the lead. The glitching of the forest becomes more pronounced. He puts his entire arm through a tree trunk they pass. He waggles his fingers after, shaking off a bizarre bout of pins and needles.

“Keep moving,” Cisco mutters.

“Oh, he speaks,” Harry says, but it’s poor timing. It triggers a coughing fit and forces them to stop for Harry to catch his breath. He waves away the water Cisco tries to force on him and Cisco waits with his hands on his hips. Harry wipes the fresh blood off his palms and lets the dizziness pass.

“A breach is looking pretty good right now,” Cisco warns.

“Oh, are we leaving? I didn’t know you were ready to go home. I’m ready whenever you are.”

“Done dying? Good. Start walking.”

Harry stares at him. Cisco grabs and forcibly turns him, and Harry’s head throbs violently. He spins on Cisco, fighting his hands, and Cisco balls his hands up in the front of Harry’s shirt, dragging him back around. He drags Harry step by stumbling step.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he hisses, barely loud enough for Harry to hear. “Nothing with a heartbeat should be here. I should have sent you away the second I saw you, but I—”

“Excuse me,” Harry gasps. “Whose ass had to be carried thirteen miles uphill? You _need_  me here.”

“If you so much as sneeze,” Cisco says. “Don’t even breathe wrong, I’m telling you---"

Harry ducks and twists out of Cisco’s death grip. He dodges when Cisco reaches for him and his bad knee flares white hot, blinds him, and Harry goes down. Cisco is there. He catches Harry under the armpits and they both slide a few feet on slimy, rotten leaves and slippery stones before Cisco manages to dig his heels in and stop them. Cisco’s wide eyes fill his vision. He seems to be holding his breath.

“You’re really freaking out,” Harry says, pained. Cisco’s breath bursts out of him all at once. “Just admit it. You’re losing your mind because I might be in danger and you can’t cope.”

Cisco tries to drop him but Harry latches on.

“Admit it, Cisco. You care so much you’d leave right now if I asked you to. You already gave her six months of your life, but you’d throw it all way.”

Cisco gets loose and stomps ahead. Harry hobbles after him, every step part of his bitter victory march.

“I win,” Harry informs The Universe and Cisco gleefully. More blood dribbles from his nostril that he judiciously wipes away unseen. “I win and she loses. You’d save me first.”

Cisco stops so suddenly Harry almost runs into him. “Are you asking?”

Harry’s not an idiot. The path of least resistance is usually a trap. Cisco is surrounded by heroes every day. The ordinary no longer moves him.

“No,” Harry says. “Keep walking, Ramon.”

Cisco walks. Harry shuffles. It feels like they’ll never stop. Cisco does take it easier on him, though, or maybe he lost the second wind when he burned his anger out. Harry hears him humming. He does that sometime, echoes whatever his mother hummed to him when he was younger. Anxiety is shutting him down.

The air shifts the higher they climb. It’s heavier, thicker. The forest is more glitch than actual. One wrong step threatens to send him hurtling between world. Forward movement requires significant force and his joints resist motion. The smell of rusted metal infuses every breath. Harry leans heavily on his walking stick.

“We’re almost there,” Harry says.

Cisco barely looks at him. “Yeah. There’s a break in the trees ahead, then the stairs.”

“Stairs.” Harry coughs behind compressed lips. “Wonderful.”

The stray hair around Cisco’s ears float, electrified with blue light. The glow brightens the closer they get to the break in the trees, like a galaxy is alive within each strand.

“Here we go,” Cisco whispers when they get to a silver pool of light suspended between two enormous, curving trees. The pool vibrates when he speaks, stretching toward them. Cisco reaches back for Harry’s hand and his face is nearly transparent in the reflection. He’s never looked so scared before that Harry can remember. Harry tucks his palm into Cisco’s.

“Take a deep breath,” Cisco says, and steps forward.

Harry shuts his eyes. A second later, he squints one open, then the other.

The temple is something straight out of a cave wall pictogram. The stairs lead in multiple directions high above the tree line. Some end abruptly, with no destination, only to pick back up again mid-air. A metallic sphere sits at the top of the stairs, glowing with rolling internal lights. The air around them writhes with life. Miniature galaxies crash into each other, pause, and spiral to new life. Harry could reach out and pluck one like an apple from a low hanging branch.

When he wiggles his fingers in front of his face, they superimpose over themselves, ghosting his motions. He goes cross-eyed trying to catch up to his real hand and has to cover his eyes.

“I might be sick.” Harry swallows thickly. When he uncovers his eyes, Cisco turns to him and it triggers another round. “Hold on. Stop moving.”

“No touching,” Cisco says. “Try not to bump anything if you can help it.”

Harry pinches himself. Inconclusive. He reaches out and pinches Cisco instead.

“Ouch,” Cisco says. “Jesus, Harry. What did I just say about touching?”

“That doesn’t look like any temple I’ve seen,” Harry says. “It looks more like an LSD trip.”

“I know. Pretty sweet, right?”

“Only you would be plugged into some hippy holy grail as a source of power.”

As if commanded, a small truck floats up over the tree line and throws itself against the barrier. Purple and yellow sparks crackle brilliantly above in all directions. It’s what tie-dyed t-shirt dreams are made of.

Cisco starts up the stairs. Harry grumbles and throws the stick aside. He holds onto the railing suspiciously as he traces Cisco’s footsteps. Cisco goes cautiously, head down. The light from the sphere outlines him, glowing off his hair and leathers; it shines brightly on the masking tape and nails holding everything together. He ducks an orbiting galaxy and Harry does the same. Cisco’s every footstep leaves behind a prism of illuminated colors that Harry smears with his own muddy boot.

“You’ve always wanted to know why I’m so careful,” Cisco says, hopping a small gap between sets of stairs. Afterimages of the move give chase behind him. “It’s because of this place. The powers I have may have been given out of love, but---”

“Again. Not me.” Harry makes the jump next, taking the worst of the landing on his good leg. He tries not to puke as the world spins. “Actual and significantly less evil Harry Wells present.”

Cisco talks over him as usual.

“I don’t care to see the big picture,” he says. “I like my small life.”

At an insurmountable break in the stairs, Cisco stops and Harry comes to stand beside him. Cisco lifts his hand and a path of Cisco’s watery blue energy emerges at their feet, then solidifies into a silver plane that isn’t unlike the barrier.

“After you,” Cisco says. “Think of it like a trust fall.”

“Funny. Should you have done that? Don’t pass out on me now.”

“Better hurry up then.”

With weak knees, Harry crosses the bridge.

“Try not to look down,” Cisco advises, so naturally that’s all Harry can think about. He doesn’t actually plunge to his death, but he’d pick an actual bridge over something Cisco weaves out of vibrating matter any day. Cisco follows close behind, breathing down the back of his neck basically, and Harry gets the feeling that Cisco isn’t one hundred percent in love with his design either; maybe it’s the hyperventilating.

On the other side, Cisco pats Harry’s shoulder with a shaking hand and wobbles a grin at him.

“See?” Cisco says brightly. “That was fine.”

Harry squints. Cisco takes the lead again. They cross two more gaps in the staircase that way and the sphere swells and brightens as they approach. Harry isn’t sure if it’s a depth perception issue or if it knows they’re here. At the top of the stairs, Harry picks up on a high-pitched humming sound.

Cisco approaches the sphere and it dwarves him. In front of it, he is a perfectly outlined shadow sweating purple droplets. Harry stands back as Cisco lifts one hand and the sphere flickers, sputters, and goes dark. Sudden silence. As he watches, Cisco himself begins to vibrate. Harry can see straight through him.

“Ramon.” Harry takes a tentative step forward. He doesn’t dare reach out. “What just happened?”

“She’s already here,” Cisco says. His face glitches and returns fuzzily.

Harry’s skin prickles with goosebumps.

“What?”

Sharp nails snatch Harry by the throat. Harry flings his elbow out blindly, connects with empty air. A laugh tinkles prettily back at him and the nails gouge his trachea. Energy jolts up his jaw and makes his teeth vibrate. He bites his own tongue.

Cisco’s pivots robotically, hair fluttering and catching on the side of his ghostly face. His mouth trembles open and shut.

Harry spits a string of blood. “Always a pleasure, Cynthia.”

She presses warm and soft along his backside. She’s shorter than him by a solid foot, but Harry knows that just means she has a lower center of gravity. He counts two guns and at least three knives and that’s just her front pockets.

“Harry.” Cynthia chuckles in his ear and traces his windpipe. “I wish I could say I was surprised to see you, but there’s always some fuckboy version of you sniffing around Cisco, isn’t there? It was useful at first, when I couldn’t be there to keep him company, but you got a little too greedy.”

 _Greedy_. That word again. Harry smiles around his mouthful of blood.

“You’re not wrong,” Harry admits.

Cisco steps forward and Harry feels Cynthia go high and tight behind him. Her heart trips and the hand around Harry’s throat loosens slightly.

“How did you trick me?” The sphere pulses behind Cisco. “You were hours behind.”

“I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you, sweetheart,” Cynthia says with gentleness that stings. Harry balls his fists uselessly at his sides as he watches Cisco struggle to keep his heart off his face with as little success as usual. “I’m assuming you realize how outmatched the two of you are. How about a trade?”

The sky lights up again. Red and gold sparks this time. Ten points to Gryffindor.

“Let him go,” Cisco says, reflections of color bursting in the damp warp of his eyes. He glitches again and returns with more clarity. Cynthia’s tired exhale pebbles over Harry’s earlobe. He tests her grip and her hand constricts warningly.

“I’m surprised he’s not stuck up in the barrier yet,” Cynthia says. “You don’t expect him to last much longer here, do you? I can feel his atoms trying to fly apart as we speak. I can make that happen faster.”

She shifts against him and kicks his feet apart, scuffing dust up from the platform. It lifts around them and hovers, a dim and rusty radiance. Harry’s scalp prickles, lizard brain croaking. He thinks of Jesse. She’ll probably be fine, but he still thinks of her.

“Cindy,” Cisco grits out. He stretches one hand out pleadingly. “Please don’t hurt him.”

“Why?” Cynthia wonders. “Because he’s yours?”

Cynthia kisses his cheek and Harry screams. He seizes into a question mark, spine electrified by the quiet placement of her hand just below his brain stem. His world collapses into a vision of pulsing membranes charging and darting away. He chases an impulse along the axon of a neuron and finds himself a child on the tall side and his mother is washing his hair in the sink and then he’s in class and everyone is so slow and stupid that he’s falling asleep. He sees Cisco for the first time, defensive and flinty eyed, and Harry thinks he’s beautiful, but he doesn’t have a clue yet how beautiful because Cisco hasn’t opened his mouth yet.

Jesse runs up the stairs and slams the door and her music is dreadful. His wife spills coffee down the front of her blouse. Harry’s fucking. He is writing on a chalk board. Barry slaps him on the shoulder. Cisco rolls his eyes, and---

Harry comes to on his knees. He croaks, long and wretched, lungs as dry and fragile as torn paper bags. Cynthia grabs his hair and jerks his head up. Through watering eyes, Harry sees rage peel Cisco’s lips back. His face is sharper than the rest of the world, every grain of his skin etched and rigid as the air around him fades out of focus. Blue light circles each of his raised hands like sharks, fully engulfing them.

Cynthia gives Harry’s head a shake. “Give me what I want, and you can have him.”

“I can never give you what you want,” Cisco says through his teeth. “Time traveling requires more juice than we have for a reason.”

“You’re wrong. I can change what happened. I just need the source. I just need that five minutes before it happened. Five minutes won’t matter.”

“And how many people will die if you do that?” Cisco asks miserably. “I’ve been down this road, baby. Leave your timeline intact. Please don’t do this.”

“He’s my dad. It’s my earth. I’ll handle it.”

“Cynthia.” Cisco edges forward.

“I know one person that will definitely die if you don’t give me what I want.”

Harry blinks rapidly as Cynthia tickles fingertips over his ear and jaw. He tries to swallow, but the angle of his neck makes him choke on his own saliva.

“You’re pretty far gone, aren’t you,” Cisco whispers.

Cynthia snaps her fingers tight across the bottom of Harry’s face and squeezes.

“You have no idea what kind of hell I’m living in. My father is dead because of me. I watched him bleed out. The way he looked at me. He knew it was my fault.” Her voice gets wet and Harry turns as much as he can, getting a look at her ragged, dirt-streaked face in the rotating light. “What are you looking at? I’m not talking to you!” She shoves on his spine threateningly and Harry turns to the front, putting his head down. “At least he listens, Cisco. You never do.”

“I’m listening now.” Cisco steps forward again. The duffle swings off his shoulder. “Let him go. I won’t let you hurt him.”

“I don’t think I can be any clearer about my terms. Give me the source. I’ll give you Harry.”

Cisco looks at her flatly. Harry watches something in him go offline. He shrugs and shakes his head, then meets Harry’s eyes for the first time since Cynthia grabbed him.

“You shouldn’t have come, Harry,” Cisco says.

“Cisco don’t,” Harry says but Cisco is already reaching into the bag. Cynthia’s hand heats up over his mouth and Harry gasps through her fingers. Cynthia bends down, tendrils of her hair tickling his neck as she whispers in his ear.

“I guess he likes you after all,” she hisses, and she sounds unhappy. Static snaps at the side of his face and he flinches away.

“You can’t do this forever,” Harry pants. “You’re weaker here.”

“I’m about to get a power up,” Cynthia says. “I’m not concerned about the side effects.”

To prove it, she nudges his ribcage with her knee and vibrates the blood out of his heart. Harry goes faint and starts to droop, but she catches him before he collapses.

“Too slow, Cisco,” she warns.

“Stop it! I’m getting it, I’m getting it.” Cisco upends the bag and shakes it violently, spilling bandages, clothes, tools, and odd metal parts. Some of it hits the platform. What doesn’t, lingers. Bullets catch around his hips and orbit his waist like space debris. He plucks the source from mid-air and drops the duffel. “Here! Now let him go!”

Cisco holds the square chunk out, flat on his palm. The cracks in it glow with the same inner light of the temple. The protective wrapper that keeps it away from Cisco’s skin flutters threateningly in the snagging breeze.

Cynthia lets go of Harry with one hand to reach for it. She has to strain around Harry. Red tendrils stretch hopefully from her fingertips. Harry feels her shaking. One of her feet lifts from the ground. It takes less than a second for Harry to do the math and come up with how many ways this is going to destroy what he’s building with Cisco.

Harry levers his balance to his heels, fists his hands against the dirt, and drives himself upward. Her nose gives way with a wet crunch. She cries out and he knocks her sideways, the red tendrils of her power tracing the air after her. Harry turns with Cisco’s gun raised, but she dives and rolls away and he ends up shooting empty space.

“Harry!” Cisco shouts, diving for his waist. “No gun! Bad!”

“What? I know!” Harry pushes Cisco away by the face and rolls his eyes. “I’m going for a flesh wound, Ramon!”

Harry swings around just in time for Cynthia to kick his forearm and the gun goes flying. Cisco puts himself between them just as Cynthia lashes out with a ribbon of red and Cisco jerks backward, thrown into Harry’s chest. Harry catches his weight and Cisco makes a choking sound. Over Cisco’s head, Harry sees Cynthia go pale under all the blood. The red light she holds flickers and dies out.

Cisco shudders and Harry rips him around. He expects blood. He gets something else.

Cisco’s eyes are shut. The front of his leather jacket is unsnapped and unzipped, spread open around Cisco’s splayed palm pressing flat on his own chest. His hand glows, skin transparent over bone and tendon. Harry’s fingers tremble above Cisco’s knuckles.

“You should stay back,” Cisco says, eyes still squeezed shut.

Harry shakes his head. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“Do you trust me, Harry?”

“Trust isn’t the problem.”

“No.” Cisco’s mouth flickers up, but Harry isn’t laughing. “You trust me. It’s yourself that you don’t trust. You don’t think you deserve me, so you won’t let yourself have me.” Cisco opens his eyes at last and they are bright blue holes in his face. “Don’t be scared, Harry. You’re going home soon. I’ll fix everything.”

When Cisco lifts his hand away, the source is lodged into his chest, a dark rectangle lit up with wires of blue light and symbols Harry has never seen before. Like a microchip. Harry squeezes Cisco’s shoulder so tightly he feels like they should give away and crumble to dust. Cisco grows warmer by the second. The weight of him drags Harry closer and his feet scrape the platform.

“Cisco,” Cynthia says in a harsh whisper. She seems to be struggling against the same pull. She trembles a few feet away, lit up by the sphere. “It will burn you out. You’ll die.”

Cisco blinks around the light. “In a sense.”

No.

Harry claws at Cisco’s chest, is maybe going to rip the source out with his hands, but Cisco pushes him gently away. “I wouldn’t do that, Harry.”

“Get it out of him,” Harry orders Cynthia. “Use your powers. Do something!”

“I can’t touch it.” She looks all of twelve years old suddenly. She rocks from one foot to the other. “It’s not meant to be touched. Cisco. Sweetheart, no.”

Cisco blinks again and his eyelids no longer block the glow. He smiles serenely and starlight spills out of his mouth.

“And now it’s using him.” Harry touches Cisco’s face and the pressure of his fingers leave blue imprints on Cisco’s cheek. “This is so very bad, Cisco. Can you take it out? Can you do that for me? Just, here, take your hand and---” He fumbles his own hand around Cisco’s and leads it up to Cisco’s chest, where he presses. “Take it out. Right now.”

“You worry too much,” Cisco says vacantly. “You should relax. I know what to do.”

Cisco pulls away from him and Harry staggers after him. Cisco turns and two portals appear on either side of Cisco, but Cisco’s hands hang at his sides.

“Go home, Cynthia,” Cisco says. “Go home and grieve.”

Cynthia shakes her head. Red light sparks weakly from her fingertips.

“You’re sick.” Cisco lifts an unconcerned eyebrow. “Go rest. You can come for the source when my body is done with it. It shouldn’t take long.”

“What will happen to you?”

Cisco doesn’t answer. Cynthia’s face crumples. She edges toward Cisco and almost touches his face, but doesn’t quite manage it. Good. She bites her lip and pulls her hand back.

“You haven’t hurt anyone but yourself,” Cisco tells her. “I did this to myself. Go home and sleep.”

Cynthia turns and Harry gets a better look at the wreckage of her face. The blood can’t hide the tears. She darts a look at him, twenty percent guilt and eighty percent rage. Harry wishes the worst for her. If he had half of her strength, she wouldn’t have been a problem. If they meet again, he won’t settle for a flesh wound. She nods at him and it’s clear they share the same sentiment. As usual. She goes through the portal.

Cisco turns to him, with his mouth lifted on one side. “Your turn.”

Harry shakes his head.

“Always so stubborn,” Cisco says.

“Hah,” Harry says. “You have no idea.”

“Do what I say,” Cisco says calmly. He sounds nothing like himself. There’s no spark to him. None of the spine. “Go be with your daughter and stop being so afraid all the time. She looks up to you. You won’t lose her to her team.”

“I’m not going, Cisco,” Harry says.

He dodges when Cisco reaches out and Cisco frowns mildly, reaching out again, but Harry slaps his hand and skids across the platform. The red dust billows between them, littered with trash from Cisco’s duffel. Harry plucks a screw out of the floating debris and chucks it at Cisco’s head.

Cisco blinks. A blue mark glows where Harry landed a hit.

“Don’t annoy me, Harry,” he says. He sounds almost surprised. Harry gives him the finger and grabs one of the floating protein bars. It’s smashes satisfyingly between Cisco’s eyes.

Cisco swats the next three things Harry throws away like flies. He blinks out of existence entirely to avoid the whole duffel and reappears a second later, frowning harder.

“You’re wasting my time. Just go before you’re trapped here.”

“Ok, I’ll go,” Harry says. “Not.”

Cisco sighs. He looks at Harry’s feet and a portal opens up under Harry, but Harry leaps sideways, catching the railing just before he tumbles down the stairs.

“I’m smarter than you,” Harry reminds him. He pulls himself back to his feet and squares off with the ghostly doppelganger of his lover. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“I won’t be dead,” Cisco says. He gestures to the barrier. “I’ll be everywhere and nowhere. It would have happened eventually anyway. This is my function.”

“Nope,” Harry says. He steps down the stairs as Cisco approaches. “Sorry.”

“Harry.”

“Take me with you then.”

Cisco pauses his forward momentum. He glitches.

“It’s not possible.” He looks almost regretful. “We’re different. You’re not made for it.”

“Then make me that way.”

“I can’t,” Cisco says.

“Bullshit.” Harry steps up again and uses his full height to loom over Cisco’s unfeeling face. “Go ahead. Make me a meta. Let me vibe. You’re just scared I’ll vibe better than you ever could. Come at me.” Harry lifts his arms wide. “Change me.”

Cisco clenches his fist. “No, Harry. Now go!”

Harry is pushed backwards by the shout. He shakes it off and plows forward. Cisco puts his hands up bracingly, but Harry wraps himself around Cisco and hugs him. Cisco stands there, arms caught between them.

“Hug me back,” Harry pleads. He drags his cheek over Cisco’s throat and feels his throat bog uncertainly. “If you’re really you, you’ll hug me back. I’m your friend, remember?”

“You’re more than that,” Cisco says emotionlessly, but he puts his hand on the center of his back and pats.

Harry squeezes his eyes shut and sways with him. Cisco lets him. He’s so hot to the touch that it almost hurts to hold him. There’s an intense vibration coming from his chest. Harry opens his eyes and stares straight at the sphere, which is getting dimmer.

Cisco’s not wrong that they’re different, but Cisco is very wrong about how. Harry pulls away and Cisco’s hair sticks to the side of his face. From his inner jacket pocket, he withdraws the knife from the sheath. He drags his hand down from the back of Cisco’s skull and cups his neck gently. He kisses him.

“Stay still,” he says against Cisco’s mouth. “I don’t want to hurt you more than I have to.”

“You won’t hurt me.” Cisco’s eyelashes flutter open over the blue light when Harry pulls back. He glances at the knife with little concern. “I hold your miserable world together, Harry. You’re in love with me.”

Harry shrugs. “Yeah, well. I like you better when you’re a mouth breather like me.”

Harry nudges the tip of the knife where the sources merges with Cisco’s flesh. Cisco’s eyebrows slowly come together. He feels even hotter within Harry’s hold.

“You won’t,” Cisco says, but he sounds less certain.

“Cisco,” Harry says. “I’d do anything.”

Cisco screams when Harry starts sawing with the knife.

*

Rewind again. This time to the morning before they discover Cisco in the basement.

When Barry sniffs Harry out, he’s at Cisco’s desk trying to restore Cisco’s hard drive with little success. Whatever Cisco had done to it to cover his tracks was insidious. The more code Harry inputs, the deeper the infection spreads. It might have been the combustive blast that brought Barry to the workshop. When he arrives, Harry is standing over the charred remains of Cisco’s work station, smoke billowing from the spot Cisco’s computer used to be.

Barry lifts both eyebrows. “Laser gun?”

Harry shakes his head. “Chemistry.”

Barry nods like that makes sense to him. “How you, uh, how you hanging in there?”

“I’m great,” Harry says. He sits in Cisco’s still smoking chair and gives it a spin. He can almost stand the pity on Barry’s face when it’s a blur. “Never been better. I needed a little space to work. Pretty crowded in here, don’t you think?”

“Sure.” Barry puts his hands in his pockets and looks around cautiously. “I was thinking we should remodel anyway. You saved me some paperwork.”

“Mm.” Harry puts his boots down and stills the chair. This is terrible. “Ok, shoot. Say what’s on your mind and get out.”

Barry licks his lips. The shifting of his feet is a tell. He’d rather be running. Looks like someone drew the short straw.

“Iris thinks you should talk about it,” Barry says finally, after practically turning blue from holding his breath. “She thinks you and Cisco were. More.”

“More?”

“More.” Barry nods reluctantly, then winces. “Like, together. Boyfriends. That sounds weird, doesn’t it? Partners?”

What it actually sounds is nice. And like it’s never going to happen. Not on this Earth, during this timeline anyway and hey, that’s a thought. Harry peers at Barry over his glasses and Barry shifts again, looking away.

“Cisco means more to me than anyone on this planet,” Harry allows, because he hasn’t slept for days and he’s weak. “Take that however you want, but I’m done talking about it.” He stands and dusts the soot off his jeans. “Let’s take another look at the satellite.”

“Harry,” Barry says when Harry passes him. “What is it with you two? I’ve never met a Harrison Wells that Cisco couldn’t wrap around his finger.”

Harry doesn’t stop walking. “Chemistry,” he throws behind him, because he thinks it’s a good line and he likes it when he’s funny.

*

When Harry wakes, it’s to a steady, insistent beeping that is all too familiar.

“Can someone turn that shit off?” he grumbles, slapping out along starched sheets and wincing when the tubes pinch his hands. He hears the click of heels and cool fingers brush the side of his face. She smells like hand sanitizer, like always, but today it makes his stomach turn. Harry groans and opens his eyes. It’s dim in the lab. Only one fluorescent bulb flickers unkindly from the desk.

Snow leans over him, looking concerned.

“Harry? Stop moving, you’ll pull your stitches.” She moves his hands out of the way when he starts pushing his blankets off. “Quit it before I sedate you.”

“Stitches,” Harry rasps. “Why would I need stitches?”

What is this. He was. There was---He blinks and looks around. Everything looks normal, but it can’t be because there are stitches.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Snow slaps his hands away from his own body when he tries patting himself down in search of missing pieces. “Maybe it’s because you reached into the trans-dimensional space and dropped a house on everyone. Sound familiar? You big jerk.”

Harry freezes. “Cisco.”

“He’s fine. Unlike your head. And three of your ribs. Your body protected him from the worst of the collapse. Barry’s fine too, no thanks to your betraying, poison-injecting ass. He carried both of you out of there. You’re welcome.”

Harry blinks up at her. “Why are you so grumpy?”

Snow wilts a little, as expected. She’s more pout than bite.

“It’s been a very stressful week,” she says through the side of her mouth with a hint of self-depreciating smile. She should trademark that face. “You’re lucky I’m not skewering you with icepicks right now.”

Instead, she punches him in the shoulder.

“Ow?” Harry asks, but he doesn’t mean it. He’s on the good drugs this time.

“Stop trying to leave us,” Snow warns half-heartedly. She steps away and snaps her gloves off, tossing them into the trash. “I’m going to tell everyone you’re awake.”

“Wait,” Harry says, and Snow jerks to a stop, coming back at him to dangle her jewelry and hair and niceness at him. “Can I just---sleep for a while more?”

Snow stares at him. “We’re not really mad, Harry. I was trying to be funny.”

“Is Cynthia still missing?” Harry’s dry tongue sticks to his teeth. “Did she contact Cisco?”

Snow leans away. She purses her lips together and a little ice crawls up her cheeks, frosting the tips of her eyelashes prettily. Harry scowls down at his blanket covered toes.

“I don’t even know her, really,” Snow says. When Harry looks up, there’s a hint of white in Snow’s hair. It suits her, he often thinks. It’s too bad she fights that side of herself so hard. “What I do know is that I wouldn’t have traded Cisco’s life for hers. I wouldn’t have traded yours either, if you’re wondering. You did good, Harry.”

Harry stares.

“Sleep if you need to,” Snow says, and the white melts back into her scalp like it was never there. She smiles gently and pats his arm. “I’ll hold the monsters at bay.”

Harry watches her walk away on her towering high heels. When the glass door shuts behind her, he turns onto his side gingerly and feels his heart throb in his chest until he is calm again and then he sleeps.

*

Harry is sitting up reading when Cisco rolls into the room, awkwardly maneuvering the wheelchair through the door. Harry snaps the book shut and sets it aside.

“Look, it’s Toto,” Harry says.

“Very funny, Dorothy.”

Cisco’s hair is damp, pushed back from his face, and shorter than Harry remembers while somehow still the exact correct length. His face looks naked without the beard, but his chin dimple is visible again. There are bandages on his hands. Harry’s heart does funny things at the first sight of him, and he’s glad Snow silenced the telemetry.

Harry pushes himself further up in bed and settles his hands together on his lap. Cisco wheels closer. He stops by Harry’s side, close enough that the scent of soap and lotion reach him.

“It’s just a formality,” Cisco says. He slaps the padded arms of the chair to clarify. “I’m a fall risk apparently.”

“You start so low to the ground, though,” Harry says.

“Excuse me, Gumby, I’m actually---” Cisco stops when Harry lets his smile tug free. “It’s good to see you awake, Harry. You had us worried for a while there.”

“I could say the same to you,” Harry says gruffly. “Come to think of it, I am.”

Cisco nods and plucks at the blue knitted blanket covering Harry’s legs.

“What is it?”

Cisco draws his lips to the side, twitchingly, fighting some emotion. He’s staring at his own fingers on the blanket.

“Cisco?” Harry pushes.

A tear swells and breaks in Cisco’s eyelashes. He swipes at it and lifts his wet eyes to Harry, smiling tremulously. It takes everything in Harry not to pull the blanket up over his own head and hide until Cisco and his problems go away. He can’t do that because Cisco might actually leave.

“I just feel so bad about it,” Cisco says and chuckles, a mucous-filled, confused noise. “Barry, an actual expert at screwing up, says I have nothing to feel bad about, but.” Cisco shrugs, and that smile of his just keeps growing until it eats his face. “Here I am, feeling like a failure. I’m not much of a hero, Harry.”

“I don’t care,” Harry says savagely.

Cisco’s awful smile slides sideways. He lets go of Harry’s blanket.

“I don’t,” Harry says. “I couldn’t give a damn if you choose to be a hero or handyman. Go sell bootleg copies of 1920s pornography.” Cisco’s eyebrows climb further and further up his face. “You do whatever you want. Be a hero or don’t. I’ll be here. I’ll take you.”

Harry stops talking. Cisco almost makes him feel like he can manage it, but it’s better to be cautious.

Cisco shakes his head, frowning. It could be faint annoyance or gas. Or it could be that he is as confused as Harry is. He wheels squeakily closer and places one cold hand over Harry’s. His hands are always cold. Harry stares at it on his own and wonders if he’s going to be let down gently. Cisco tucks his fingertips into the crease of Harry’s palm and squeezes.

“What am I gong to do with you, Harry? I don’t know how this can work.”

Harry snorts. He has an answer to that at least. “That’s why I’m the brains and you’re the beauty.”

Cisco laughs again, for real this time. “Me? The beauty? Well, you’re not wrong.”

“You have good hair,” Harry says grudgingly.

Cisco pulls away to give it a fluff. “You think?”

Harry feels his eyes grow soft as he follows the fall of Cisco’s curls over his shoulder.

“You could grow it out. The braid suits you.”

“Huh,” Cisco says thoughtfully. His eyes pin Harry and for a second Harry wonders if Cisco’s ever-expanding skill set now includes telepathy. Harry feels completely dissected and mildly aroused by it. Situation normal, then. “You, uh.” Cisco pauses dramatically and scratches his chin. “You maybe wanna take a ride in a wheelchair to get some coffee? I’ve been assured Caitlin wasn’t involved in the brewing process at all.”

Harry considers. “Ok,” he allows. “But you have to kiss me first. On the mouth. And I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

Cisco gives him some kind of eyes Harry’s never seen before. It seems like a good sign. Harry kicks the blanket off and swings his legs over the side of the bed, and with Cisco’s help, manages to avoid falling flat on his face. Cisco smells even better up close. It’s been a good week.

 

END

 

 

> “Oh, I will judge myself guilty of loving you too much
> 
>  I will smother you just to feel your touch
> 
> I will offer you my whole self
> 
> Not just my best
> 
> You can take me as I come
> 
> Or discard me like the rest.”
> 
> ##                                  Outside - Tender
> 
>  
> 
>  

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So, first off. I've been totally Jossed re: Harry's past but I truly do not care. I left it because it felt right at the time I wrote this and it fits with the story I'm telling here, so. Secondly, I loved writing this. Even when I hated writing it, I loved it. I've missed being able to suffer and whine about the blood, sweat, and tears writing requires. I missed the writing and re-writing. I missed realizing you wrote yourself into a corner and you have to scrap five new pages (haha, more like TEN). The point is: thank you for being an audience I am excited to share this with, because I truly am. I hope the adventure is as fun and interesting to read as it was to write. Comments will make my year.
> 
> Furthermore, I hope I made the fact that Cynthia was a catalyst here palatable. I didn't want her to be a bad guy, but I wanted her to do a bad thing and cause a mess in which Harry and Cisco could roll around in also making messes, so this is how I made that happen.
> 
> Lastly, I listened to Tender for pretty much the entire duration of this story, so they're at least partially to blame.
> 
> Sometimes I tumblr when I feel like tumblring at fabella-aka-wistfulfever.tumblr.com.


End file.
